No Age/Dan Deacon/Deerhunter (No Deachunter? Dan Agehunter? Deer! No, Deacon!)

The above T-shirt design (yes, with all three bands in the womb) was sold at all of these shows. It was designed by one of the lunatics in CSS, and it honestly freaks me out a bit. Moving on!

Upon hearing the announcement of the No Age/Deerhunter/Dan Deacon "Round Robin/Pitchfork Wet Dream" Tour and the corresponding dates, I wasn't really sure how to react: the tour is only a week long, and other than Brooklyn, there wasn't a single place that made much sense to me (Newport, KY?). One of the dates was about twenty minutes from my house, but I couldn't make it because I'm in New York for the summer. The next-best option, in Brooklyn, was another that I couldn't make because of All Points West, so I thought I was kind of out of luck.

Then, well, unforeseen circumstances brought me to Millvale, Pennsylvania. This is a place you never want to visit on your own. I promise. Really, the whole Pittsburgh area is a place that you don't want to visit voluntarily. In October, a movie called The Road will be released, and the trailer basically paints a bleak picture of the apocalypse. In a move that can only be described as genius, the movie studio elected to film in Pittsburgh because it already looks like the apocalypse happened there. I'm serious. They didn't have to change all that much.

But I digress.

The show itself was a bit of a strange experience. All three acts came out at first and played a Deerhunter track to start, and then things settled down, with each act playing one song at a time. About halfway in, each band started playing their songs in pairs, and eventually, they all closed the set out together again. For a while, I was totally fine with this. After all, the first 12 songs or so were so high-energy, you could barely tell the difference.

The point that the energy started to drop was when Deerhunter came out and played "Microcastle." From then on, the transitions were a bit slower, and a bit awkward. With none of the bands blitzing into their songs anymore, coupled with no band ever getting a chance to play more than like three tracks in a row, you could start to see the lack of cohesiveness affecting the show.

But overall, it was solid. All of the bands were great, especially No Age, but I just wish Dan Deacon would stop it with the random stupid party games during his songs. Check this out:



Granted, with each band switching on and off, it would have been tough for the show to flow perfectly, but this obviously doesn't help, does it? Dan Deacon: 27 year old man-baby.

Anyway, here are some videos from each. Sadly, there aren't good Deerhunter or No Age videos from this show, but you get the idea.

Deerhunter:



No Age:



Dan Manbaby and a screeching cat:



And finally, one of the opening acts, Ed Schrader. A little background on this guy: he apparently hosts a radio show in Baltimore entitled "The Ed Schrader Show." Go figure. Also, I think he lost his mind a while back. He came out on stage singing something from the musical "Man of La Mancha," and everyone assumed he was just a sound check guy. Twenty minutes later, everyone was really, really confused.

Just try and get through all of this from the Baltimore show (he played it in Millvale too):



Yup. It was all like this. Just him and his drum, but way less cute than the little drummer boy.

He looks like a fucking mad scientist, does he not?

On that, I'm off. Tomorrow: Weezy.

Love,
Jim