Mid set what we’ve got are “Golden Days” and “Head of Steam,” two of Black Helicopter’s poppiest tunes, and I notice Moore and Mike Watt standing at the side of the stage, getting off on watching the band play. Their presence brings the crowd closer. After “Warshed Out,” Mike starts taunting our bassist, Zack Lazar — so much so that Zack has to turn away to concentrate on the set closer, “All the Sense in the World.”
In the official booklet, Charalambides are listed as being from Oakland, but they got their start in Houston, and Christina Carter lives in Easthampton, so they too have New England roots. They’re next up inside, where they conjure a slow-motion haze that makes the whole room feel as if it were swimming in a cough syrup-filled aquarium.
Led by Michael Pitt (star of the Gus Van Sant film Last Days, where he played a Kurt Cobain–like character), NYC’s Pagoda are up next. As in the film, his songs have a moody, brooding force. Connecticut’s Magik Markers get the crowd packed back inside, but it’s tough to tell what’s going on at any given moment. Even my height isn’t to my advantage when Elisa Ambrosio is writhing on stage, throttling her guitar and wailing into the microphone. Buffalo Tom’s Chris Colbourn hovers near the stage, and veteran freelance photographer John Strymish is pressed up against a speaker column.
Moore comes back with Samara Lubelski on viola and Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley on drums. He leads them through a set of some new songs that might as well be Sonic Youth demos, even if the viola gives a certain delicacy to the overall feel. When the New York trio Tall Firs come to the inside stage, the bring so much structure to their material that it almost makes up for all of the experimentation that preceded it.
Boston’s Sunburned Hand of the Man, on the other hand, try their best to create songs out of blocks of sound, but they’re without their bass player, and the funk-derived Sturm und Drang that characterizes their incendiary sets is missing. MV & EE were scheduled to close out the evening, but the Vermont duo have taken a TKO after spending the day taunting the Texas sun and drinking beer.
As the night winds down, the bartender asks our guitarist, Tim Shea, for a T-shirt and trades more cold beer. When Matt Nicholas, our drummer, asks about getting a shirt from the venue in his size, the bartender takes the shirt off his back. Hard to imagine that’s the kind of thing that happens here regularly.
