By Toni Tiemann

There are a couple of concerns that come along with walking into any instrumental show. Will the band be able to connect with the audience? Will I get bored after a couple of songs? What am I going to do in place of shouting all of the popular lyrics? Delicate Steve put any of these and more immediately to rest, check breaking all barriers between band and audience to deliver a wild and energy-driven set on May 2.

The floor was littered with pedal boards before the band even hopped on the humble Great Scott stage, viagra buy piquing the interest of seasoned fans and casual concertgoers alike. (There’s something about a bass player cluttered with pedals that’s always welcomed albeit unusual.) Somehow, the band managed to jump wildly in the cramped quarters, led by the dramatic and spastic movements of lead guitarist Steve Marion.

From the first note of their set, a crowd-pleasing version of “Afria Talks To You” off the 2012 LP Positive Force, the audience was hooked by Marion’s intricate and squealing guitar, characterized by atypical slide joining forces with upbeat and rhythmic riffs.

There’s a certain level of intrigue that comes from a band whose only stage banter is repeating the word “Boston” between most songs. That’s just about the only word that came out of the band, with the exception of Marion’s explanation that Delicate Steve’s drummer, Jeremy Gustin, originally hails from Newton, MA.

What the band lacked in stage banter, it made up for in impressive group dynamics. Delicate Steve exercised an elegant and crucial sense of awareness between members, from the flawless climactic song transitions to the synchronized movements and solos. Take, for example, the numerous times Marion held up Gustin’s ride cymbal when he hit so hard it came clear off its stand without either member missing a note. On another occasion, Marion jumped to the right of the stage to allow the other three members to take lead on the intro to a song, before he unexpectedly bounded behind the keyboard to let the auxiliary member shred on guitar.

At one point in the night, the band crouched to the floor in sync, with a member lifting a leg here or there, before bursting into a rowdy bridge. Moments like this coupled with the time the band stopped playing music to start a brief hot potato-like game with their water bottles showed the group was there for one thing and one thing only – to show Boston a fun and carefree time.

Marion warned us this would be the case when we interviewed him last week, as he explained, “That’s what we enjoy doing. We concentrate on putting on a high-energy performance for the crowd. Blow ‘em away.”

That’s exactly what the group did, blowing the audience away during the closing hit, “Butterfly.”

Opening for the night was the Boston-based Couples Counseling, which is the solo project of Virginia de la Pozas. The music she creates is close to indescribable, but often floats somewhere in limbo between any melody and harmony all dripping with hauntingly ethereal vocals.

Pozas is guarded by a wall of synths and pedals, live mixing her vocals and creating songs that sometime border on what could be the next electronica hit yet are constantly pulled back into the experimental unknown. While Couples Counseling is admittedly not easily accessible to everyone, she’s to be tremendously commended for her skill behind the row of technology.