Battles + Deerhunter @ South Street Seaport 8/31

For the past two months fans of good music in New York have spent every Friday evening glued to the aging pier of the South Street Seaport. With bands like Animal Collective, The National, Ra Ra Riot, and many many more taking the stage who could blame people for having a pre-determined destination to start their weekends. This past Friday the Seaport blew all of this summer's previous shows out of the water with a two-headed monster of a bill featuring Battles and Deerhunter. Considering these two bands are the creators of two of my top 5 albums of the year I was pretty excited about the whole evening.

Having lost their guitarist only a day before, I wasn't sure how my first live experience with Deerhunter would go. I only know what I have heard about the band's live show, that Bradford is completely unpredictable during the show and that the band is one of the sharpest, tightest groups of musicians in the business. Well the second part was completely true. For the better part of an hour the four members of Deehunter shows off their noise rock skills, while Bradford joined in playing guitar for the majority of the show. However, his vocals were barely audible from where I was standing which was probably the only down part of the entire show, though its a fairly big downer. As for the band I don't know that I've ever heard the Seaport with a louder band on it, they blasted their instruments as high as they would go and left a frenzy of excited fans approaching hearing loss. It was powerful and exciting, but not quite the spectacle I was expecting when I first heard about this show. Considering I've heard stories of Karen O spilling beer on Bradford during a Mercury show and of Bradford using the encore as a place to let all of his demons upon the crowd at Bowery, it was a pretty tame show with Bradford occasionally talking to the crowd between songs but mostly to thank them. I suppose he saved his energy for his new found guitar duties, and that's fine with me because what came out of that sounded amazing.

Battles have quite a live reputation themselves, but for them it doesn't involve spectacle just spectacular musicianship displayed with passion and energy that is rarely topped in the music world. Starting as the album does with "Race: In", the band took the stage, began abusing their instruments, and had the crowd dancing like I've never seen a Seaport crowd dance. Led by drummer John Stanier, the band explores the reaches of music going away from pop standards to craft something almost alien by today's standards. The music is never in your standard 4/4 beat pushing it to new heights. Throw in the mechanical vocals provided by Tyondai Braxton and the ridiculous guitar and keyboards from Ian Williams and Dave Konopka and you pretty much have a mind blowing experience. The kids in the front knew it as they threw their hands up and danced around like possessed fools, and all around the packed crowd you saw people that were letting themselves go to this fantastic, rhythmic music. It was a beautiful scene as people danced till the end of the summer with my own personal summer soundtrack to back it.

Such an amazing experience. Such a amazing summer.
(More Pics on my Flickr)