Though the crowd was still calling for more after the encore at the end of the night, Brooklyn band Bishop Allen’s hour-long set at the Echoplex on Nov. 10 needed nothing more.
Fellow New York City indie pop outfit Darwin Deez opened the night. Like your kid sister’s Crayola drawings, their songs were funky fun and irritatingly elementary in construction.
But if it’s one thing Darwin Deez proved, it’s that indie shows can have the awesome choreographed dance sequences of huge pop and R&B concerts, too. To segue between songs, band members abandoned their instruments and danced in fully choreographed numbers to old and new hits. The highlight came in a rendition of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It),” which even pleased this indie crowd.
The second opener, Seattle band Throw Me the Statue, kept seeming like it should have been a dream-pop outfit with all the mellow vocals. But the guitars and cymbal-heavy percussion shredded and thrashed out more in a hard-rock vein. This strange but not particularly interesting combination made the band fall flat.
Bishop Allen took the stage with the mildly anthemic “Rain,” with Justin Rice leading the chorus, singing, “Oh let the rain fall down.” They then followed up with the whimsical, “Cue the Elephants” ““ and the night was looking promising.
In squarish glasses that slipped down low on his nose, Rice danced about slightly hunched, kicking his feet up behind him as if he were running in place. His moves were quirky and infinitely endearing in their awkwardness. Bishop Allen’s music sounds that way too. The songs spin narratives of an out-of-this-world setting and are delivered with a kind of naive innocence. The childlike quality here isn’t like that of Darwin Deez but rather has more wisdom and mystery.
As the night went on, the band moved away from curious ditties and opted for more rousing power-pop anthems that got the crowd bouncing. But the height of the night came toward the middle of the set, when the band performed their catchy pop masterpiece “Click, Click, Click, Click,” with the hooks that grabbed at all the right times.
This excitement was rivaled only by the crowd’s reaction when Darby Nowatka, on xylophone, melodica and other percussion, took center stage with her coy and airy warm female vocals on the song “Butterfly Nets.”
A tall woman with goddess locks flowing down to her waist, Nowatka held the crowd’s attention with her girlish, charming delivery of the song. She brought a quieter, more poignant moment to an otherwise full set of indie-pop rock-out.
It was to the crowd’s delight then, when Nowatka performed the encore, backed by frontmen Rice on vocals and xylophone and Christian Rudder on vocals and guitar. She delivered another mesmerizing, lovely moment to close out the night.
As the crowd finally began to disperse, some still lingered, hungry for more. I guess we can never have enough, but any addition may just have been excess to Bishop Allen’s spot-on night in Los Angeles.
E-mail Zhang at rzhang@media.ucla.edu.