Photo credit: Melissa Miller
It was clear from the start that singer Amelia Meath and producer Nick Sanborn were on to something when they partnered in the electronic-pop duo Sylvan Esso five years ago, but few could have expected the project to scale as well as it has. Where other acts with a similar “indie music, only with beats” hook tend to play it safe, leaning mostly on indie and employing beats mostly as an accent, Sylvan Esso have embraced EDM in all its blustery, subwoofer-rattling glory. Especially on their magnificent sophomore album, What Now, a more daring, exploratory spin on the instantly ingratiating sound they debuted on their 2014 self-titled effort, they offer the best of both worlds: music that’s bright, personable and heartfelt, but also generous with big thrills.
As Sylvan Esso’s audience has grown, so too has their live show, which now boasts an enormous light display that any Scandinavian superstar DJ would be proud to tour behind. There were times Sunday night, as mammoth rigs flooded the Pabst Theater with brilliant light at the duo’s second of two sold-out shows that weekend, where the sheer abundance of sound and color overwhelmed the venue. It felt as if they were getting away with something, squeezing a show optimized for enormous festival stages into such an intimate theater.
Yet as spectacular as the set production was, it never detracted from the night’s central draws: Meath and Sanborn, the two down-to-earth presences behind all the glamor. They worked the crowd with hand-claps, beat drops and sing-alongs. Sanborn pumped his arms while corked over his gear, his enthusiasm a proxy for the crowd’s, while Meath danced, squatted and slid around the stage like the star of her own imagined workout video. She’s become a fiercer, more physical presence by the year.
For Sanborn, who lived in Milwaukee for more than a decade, the show was a homecoming. He recalled his first time playing the Pabst Theater, when his old band Decibully opened for Califone. To commemorate that occasion, for the encore, Sylvan Esso invited Mark Waldoch (whose band, Celebrated Workingman, had also played that Califone bill) and members of Collections of Colonies of Bees on stage to premiere a convivial group cover of Califone’s “Funeral Singers.”
|
|
Collections of Colonies of Bees opened the night playing songs from their uncommonly beautiful new album, HAWAII, punctuating their performance with some elegant choreographed dances from singer Marielle Allschwang and a couple wild cameos from rapper-singer Klassik. On the surface, the band’s arty post-rock doesn’t have all that much in common with Sylvan Esso’s chipper electro-pop, but like the headliners, their set was thrillingly dynamic and joyful, and their appreciation for every moment on stage was unmistakable.
