Cambridge has been getting a whole lot of corporate-sponsored-free-concert-love and I couldn’t be happier. This one wasn’t put on by a shoe company as we’ve come to expect, instead sponsored by Pandora Presents. It was smaller in scale from House of Vans’s week-long and tons-of-bands residency, but like HoV, they took over the Middle East Downstairs and it was as shitshow of free swag.
You want some free music? RSVP and show up early. A screen-printed Delta Spirit poster? Grab one from the pile or request your own colors. A Delta Spirit t-shirt? Just hashtag #pandorapresents on any form of social media. A free drink? Go up and order one.
Yes, this went one beyond the logical leap of recent promos to the point of offering an open bar. What say you, competing user-tailored streaming internet radio programs? Are you going to take this lying down, or are you going to fight back in the form of giving me more free things down the street from my house?
It was packed. RSVPing was step one, but you would have to show up as doors open (an hour before the band) and wait in a line that, at one point, stretched to the fire station on Sidney Street (unless the music blog you write for is awesome and you get to jump ahead) in order to get in by the time the music started.
The show had no opener, it was one and done, which in this line of work can be a nice relief. As many times as I have gone to see a band and gone home with their opener’s record, sometimes it’s nice to skip the appetizer and get what you came for.
Which I guess is a pretty apt way of segueing into Delta Spirit’s set: there was of course the jangly guitar and delayed organ holding building on a note before the first song, and maybe one or two others in the hour-and-fifteen-minute-long set, but then it was their folky-punk straight through. I didn’t know much (anything) about Delta Spirit before they started playing. But the best thing about their music is how amazingly uncomplicated it is. Matt Vasquez jumped around on stage with a huge goofy grin, waved around at everyone, shouted about happy they were to be in Boston, and tore into their set.
If I was wary of the Chili Peppers shirt Vasquez was wearing (I was), it dropped after a song. Sharing nothing more than a home state with RHCP, their live sound is very crunchy and punky with a vocalist that borders on David Gray. I’m doing a studio-to-live comparison now, and I can say it was much crunchier than what you can hear on such streaming internet radio as Pandora. Right now I’m hearing a lot of delay and some clean guitar—no, no, last night was pop punk like crazy.
But with a twang. I’m definitely not trying to make a Hank Williams III comparison, and I hate when people call music “southern fried” (hey friend, you can’t fry music: that’s stupid), but it was fast and loose and had some alt-country influences that dropped off at points to just become self-aware, tight party-rock.
I don’t think most of the people there knew the Delta Spirit. There were certainly some who were singing along with everything (I believe at one point we were supposed to be “just tear[ing] it up”), but a lot of people just showed up for the booze. I say this because I don’t know how much of a “get” Delta Spirit is to headline your show. They’re nowhere on my radar, but that means nothing about their popularity. I guess what I’m saying is, it doesn’t matter that the crowd wasn’t super full of DS fans and that maybe a lot of people hadn’t heard of them, because everyone was going bananas and that night they made a room full of drunk fans wearing their merch.
During one of their later songs where the whole room was singing back some lines, I found myself grinning like an idiot and I hate everything (see: the first paragraph of this review), so I think they definitely accomplished whatever Pandora Presents wanted them to, which I guess is just to have people talk about #pandorapresents.
