Digits, Deacon, and Okkervil

15Jul07

Thursday Andrew and I went to see Big Digits and Dan Deacon upstairs at the Middle East. Andrew will hopefully post his own account of the evening a little later.

 

Mr. Butch died last week. If you’re from or live in Boston you’ve seen Mr. Butch. He was an icon. Big Digits dedicated their set to Mr. Butch and it was the best set I’ve ever seen them perform. Unfortunately the credit for the top notch set rests largely in the addition of DJ (or WiiJ) Marky Moon. No longer did they have to fiddle around with iTunes between songs, and no longer did they rely solely on their fun, but sparse video game inspired beats. Marky Moon was constantly sampling a variety of songs that complimented Big Digits’ tracks quite nicely.

Moon’s remixes created a much fuller sound for all of Digit’s songs and whether it was Mr. Butch’s death, Moon’s additions, or the enthusiastic crowd Big Digits was on the top of their game. Mac and TD seemed to be able to sense how much more effective their songs had become and went ballistic on stage.

Best Big Digits show I’ve ever seen. Hands down.

 

Thursday was the first time I had seen Dan Deacon perform. As I’ve said before I’m terrible at fitting artists into categories, but if I were to describe Deacon’s music to someone I might say, “electronic music that may be impossible to dance gracefully to.” His songs are an epileptic mix of Dan’s distorted voice and electronic beats that cause your legs to twitch and your firsts to fire into the air.

He sets up his equipment (an ipod shuffle) on the floor and allows his guests (us) to stand all around him on the stage and floor. A strobing glow-in-the-dark is the beacon that allows you to know where Dan actually is.

Overall, the show was fantastic and news that Dan would be back in September with Girl Talk made me giddy. [Note: I can't find any information that confirms that they'll be back like Dan said, but I'll cross my fingers.]

 

 

I saw Okkervil River in Concord, New Hampshire on Saturday.  Okkervil has a tight live show and the venue I saw them at had very good acoustics so the mandolin stung the air, and Will Sheff’s voice flooded the theater.  The whole atmosphere of the show was a bit weird (it was a charity event put on by a player from the Spurs – I hate the Spurs), but that sounded good and I am excited to see them in Boston in September.

 

 

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