Brightest Young Things

all words: Colin Wilhelm
all photos: Michelle Yass

Friday night on the 9:30 Club stage brought the weird and didn’t stop until Tim Harrington dryhumped at least one audience member. This made sense, as the night was billed as one centered around Trans Am, and their vision of a Kraftwerk-ruled Earth, Futureworld.

The Psychic Paramount kicked it off with a heavy, textural sound. Their music sounded alien and primordial, and could’ve easily set the soundtrack to planetary bodies colliding. Like the fog that clouded them, from what I heard they featured ambient sounds that silhouetted violent drums and an active guitar. Their music was almost mechanically trancelike, and the fog surrounding them combined with lights behind them recalled that shot from The Exorcist where the possessed girl breaks free and some weird demon statue comes out of nowhere.

Perhaps D.C.’s most well known prog/post-rockers, Trans Am played their cult classic album to it’s full, irony firmly lodged inside cheek extent. Their music recalled, at separate points, the synth-pop and metal of the 80s. Moody bass and guitar riffs inter-spliced with atmospheric synthesizer drove Trans Am’s show (and Futureworld) sonically, while goofy and/or German lyrics pushed it over the top to let you know it’s parodistic natute. The tagline for Futureworld should be: ‘Do you like metal? Do you like the early 80s? Do you like irony?’

Reviewing Trans Am’s show from Friday is almost exactly reviewing their album from 12 years ago. It’s fun, not terribly serious, and surprisingly up to date for an album recorded over a decade ago (and set in roughly 1983). Even the pseudo-Tron computer vanishing point printout symbol of said album still feels relevant today, in our age of pop-culture regurgitation through ironic appreciation. You can practically feel Trans Am playing an imaginary club in Blade Runner when you listen to the album/show. Only the infrequent vocoder lyrics, (p)reminiscent of “The Humans are Dead” from The Flight of the Conchords, break one out of the serious instrumentation.

Likewise, Tim Harrington, the lead singer of Les Savy Fav, holds at least some irony in his manic rockstar act. Whereas Trans Am holds their irony firmly in cheek, Harrington at times held a flashlight in his. Rather than waste time and space describing Harrington’s shenanigans in paragraphical form, I will instead list them.

At times during the set Harrington:

• Licked and sucked on an audience member’s middle finger
• Jumped off stage to visit the mixing board, whilst audience members held his extended audio mic cord above their heads
• Almost nailed one of their guitarists in the head when he swung his mic a la Roger Daltrey
• Sung with aforementioned flashlight in his mouth
• Jumped off the stage again, in media res, to clothe himself in a Trans Am Futureworld shirt from the merchandise stand towards the rear of the 9:30 Club
• Put his mic cord in his mouth
• Spit water on the audience
• Poured water from one of the bar pitchers the 9:30 Club constantly keeps on the audience
• Pointed out a Wayne Coyne lookalike in the audience
• The aforementioned dryhumping, which took place during the final pre-encore song, during which Harrington left stage and ground floor of the club to high-five, aforementionedly dryhump, and otherwise interact with audience members in the balcony section

Perhaps I’m burying the lede, but the creative tension between Harrington’s antics came to a head when bassist/Frenchkiss Records owner Syd Butler came to the mic to tell a story about playing with Trans Am in 1996, before his hometown crowd. Harrington interrupted Butler with a single keyboard note, which Butler responded to by asking, ”Tim do you want anymore attention?” Seconds later Harrington interrupted him a second time, again with a single note, to which a visibly upset Butler said “Well it’s a good story, find me in back [when the show’s over]”.

The crowd greeted all this with ‘oohs’ and anxious laughter, while Harrington acknowledged the tension. “Sometimes it’s hard to be in a band,” Harrington explained, before they launched into the next song. He could be seen talking one on one, hand on shoulder (presumably reconciling) with Butler after that song.

It’s a shame it’s taken this long to bring it up, but Les Savy Fav’s set once again lived up to their reputation as a strong live band through their own musicianship in addition to the spectacle their frontman puts on. The entire band brought a ton of energy to their late set, with the instrumentation and crowd-pleasing catalogue to match. The band played songs both old and new, the latter from 2010’s mostly solid Root for Ruin; the surprisingly undersold 9:30 Club crowd simply exploded for “Sweat Descends” and “Who Rocks the Party” during the encore.

Overall it was a weird concluding set to a weird night, steeped in weirdness. I doubt these bands would have it any other way.

Previously in Live DC:

• 5/22: LiveDC: Spirit Animal @ Red Palace
• 5/22: LiveDC: Astra Via @ Black Cat
• 5/22: LiveDC: Father John Misty @ Rock & Roll Hotel
• 5/22: LiveDC: Drive-By Truckers and Lucinda Williams @ Merriweather
• 5/22: Photos: Summer Camp takes the "Ladies of Town" Drag Show
• 5/22: LiveDC: Penguin Prison & Class Actress @ RNR Hotel
• 5/21: LiveDC: James Morrison @ 930 Club
• 5/21: Photos: Que Sera L'Anniversaire @ Napoleon
• 5/21: LiveDC: La Sera/ Beach Week @ Red Palace
• 5/21: LiveDC: The Black Keys & Arctic Monkeys @ Merriweather Post Pavilion