Late Thoughts on TV On The Radio at Power & Light

By JASON HARPER

Photos: SCOTT SPYCHALSKI

I was in such a rush to get the excellent photos up from the Halloweenie show at KC Live that I didn’t really get a chance to throw in any copy up. So here goes. This isn’t really a concert review, because, unfortunately, it wasn’t much like a concert.

If you’ve ever been down to that Power & Light District courtyard-living-room thing, then just imagine that place crammed with probably more than 2,000 people, most of them drinking as much as possible and talking and yelling while rock bands who employ lots of distortion in their music struggled to be heard via an inadequate sound system. The sound just rattled and drowned all over the place, a complete mess, due in equal parts to the architecture of the place and all the ambient noise, a good deal of which consisted of the booming LCD shit music being played behind every one of those clubs’ doors, many of which were open a lot of the time. It was sensory overload. And trying to buy a drink or find a rest room could take you out of the game for a good 15, 20 minutes. Song after song would just fly right by as you waited for the overworked so-and-so bartender to acknowledge you. It made you positively long for the Uptown.

I got there around 9, well before the Dirtbombs went on and just after Shiny Toy Guns had finished up. Sorry Beautiful Bodies: you were just too early. I stayed through the end of TVOTR‘s set. It’s not that the evening was impossible to enjoy, just very hard. The bands on stage were clearly bringing it as best they could — probably playing awesomely most of the time, for all I knew — but they ultimately lost their battle, as far as I was concerned, to the sheer mass-entertainment intensity of the place.

The Dirtbombs are badass, soul-infused Detroit garage rock. They’d be killer in a place like the Record Bar. TV On The Radio is layered, experimental, noisy, with lots of soft dynamics. Standing up there signing the near-acapella “A Method” (off the overall dreamlike Return to Cookie Mountain), they might as well have been the Von Trapp family. I felt especially bad for the band’s flautist — yes, flautist. Keys, wind instruments, auxiliary percussion, falsetto vocals and all, TVOTR would’ve been way better off at just about any indoor venue in the city.

I thank the Buzz and whoever else pitched in to make the show free for us all, but it’s a shame this time the crowd really did get what it paid for.