Daily Loaf

The bump-and-groove crew was in high spirits as we enjoyed a brief reprieve from our regular lives and shed the stresses of the week to take a ride on the Junior Boys’ indie train to electro jam land. [All photos by elawgrrl.]

The stage was bathed in saturated lights and scattered with Halloween trimmings; flickering jack-o-lanterns, a crow perched on the keys, a huge skull and crossbones hanging over the drums, rainbow spears of light shining up and out of the drumkit and into the audience, and occasional blasts of fog for extra effect.

Crowbar was comfortably packed and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who needed to let loose this past Friday night, who sighed in relief and pleasure as the Boys took the stage at roughly 12:30 a.m., who got caught in the mid-tempo beats and began moving as soon as the band launched into “Parallel Lines” and “Work,” the first two synthesizer fuzzed back-to-back tracks off their latest album, Begone Dull Care. I got lost in the soulfully high bedroom voice of Jeremy Greenspan, who whispered-crooned, “So, please, please, don’t touch” in “Count Souvenirs,” and I kicked into the bounce with the intro of “The Equalizer” (“Get lost, hit the floor”), both from So This Is Goodbye. I got the fuck down with the beat-zipping New Wave tripping “Hazel,” also from Care, bobbed and swayed to the slow jam of “Teach Me to Fight” from Last Exit, and had some laughs at the mid-set costume contest featuring a Brownie, Amy Winehouse, a freaky dude in a mask who got some actual boos for his lack of creativity (and likely for his general creepiness), and the obvious winner, full-on head-to-toe Gumby. Later, when the big green guy came up and started getting down with the crew, we pulled off his square Gumby head and the big reveal found our friend Jake, sweaty and hot from wearing the suit for over an hour.

The presence of a third, a real drummer instead of a drum track really gave the band’s wall-of-synth sonics a forceful punch. Programmer/electro technician Matt Didemus kept mostly to his sonicboard, but Greenspan sang and played keys or guitar, or stepped from behind his instruments altogether to serenade us directly, and remained engaged with the crowd throughout the night.

The hour-long set was, as these things go, far too short. Just as we were hitting our dancing stride, the band launched into the obvious last song (the “hit”), “In the Morning,” which obviously ended pretty quickly and left behind a whole not of anticipation that the encore will be a long one or that they’d pack in just a few more.

But there was only one, the drawn-out groove of “Under the Sun,” electro-grimy and good and ending things on a note of slowly dying reverb.

The setlist went something like this:

Parallel Lines
Work
Count Souvenirs
The Equalizer
Double Shadow
Teach Me to Fight
(Costume contest interlude)
Hazel
Birthday
Bits & Pieces
In the Morning

E:
Under the Sun

To check out more of Nicole’s rad photos, please visit the following links:

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