Joywave, a five-piece from Rochester, New York has an energy and performance quality that is absolutely unmatched. The band opened the three-act show with “In Clover,” a song that was first released in 2014 on the band’s How Do You Feel EP and would make it onto their full-length the next year. It’s high energy and relatively well known, so it was a good way to engage the audience from the jump. But to get the crowd involved, Joywave kept things weird between songs. They are a band full of personality, and are completely willing to make the audience uncomfortable. After their opening song, lead singer Daniel Armbruster offered up a t-shirt to the audience that was, as he put it, “covered in my DNA.” He also spent a few minutes wallowing in the fact that the group has played at The Midland three times in the last year and hasn’t headlined a single show. I think the band and many of their dedicated fans feel that they deserve more popularity than they’re getting.
The band played “Now,” and “Alice,” a song they wrote for the upcoming film Alice Through The Looking Glass, “Parade,” and “Somebody New” before any more strange things happened. They played Destruction next, a song the band deems “the best song ever written.” About a month ago, they actually released an album that was made up entirely of this one song, with the exception of a bonus track at the end. Nine times this song was repeated on the album, clearly the group is really proud of it. And when they play it live, it really gets audiences going. The synth and heavy bass line reverberate through your whole body.
At the end of every set, Joywave always plays “Tongues,” as it is their most well-known song, having made its way onto the Billboard charts in 2014. During the bridge of the song, Armbruster asked the crowd to crouch down so everyone could jump up and rage when the final chorus hit, but half of the crowd didn’t crouch, and as a result, the band didn’t finish the song. Instead, they started playing “Destruction” again, with Armbruster yelling, “Oh now you’ve asked for it!” You could tell the crowd was both confused and happily surprised when the band played through “Destruction” for the second time. But if the intended effect was to get the audience talking about the set and more familiar with the song, it worked. Joywave will forever be one of my favorite live bands because they keep you on your toes in the audience and their music is so high-energy and exciting to listen to. If you get the chance to see them live, don’t pass it up.
To see Foals live is to have a spiritual experience, and that’s certainly what happened when they took the stage. They fill a room and command the stage unlike any band I’ve seen, which makes for an electric atmosphere you normally only get at a venue half the size of The Midland.
Foals play into this and, in an hour-long set, performed only four tracks from their most recent album, this year’s wonderfully intelligent, award-nominated Total Life Forever. This left the band with plenty of time to indulge in some of their older and more known songs. Opening with a blistering rendition of “Snake Oil” from What Went Down, the five-piece from the UK made their intentions clear from the start. “Yeah, we’re gonna have a good time,” front man Yannis Philippakis told the crowd. What surprised me the most about the set is that the group continued to build momentum throughout, despite playing some of their most highly charged stuff in the middle of their set. You would think that after playing “Spanish Sahara,” a guns blazing rock anthem, that everything else would be calm in comparison, but that was not the case. The crowd was completely involved from beginning to end. Playing off the frenzy, lead singer Philippakis took every opportunity to engage himself with the crowd, from dumping water on himself and launching the bottle into the audience to jumping off the stage into the crowd.
From the rampaging funk of “Mountain At My Gates,” to the sparkling rendition of “Red Socks Pugie,” this set was an overview of the band’s varied career and underlined it all with a level of cohesiveness that unified the band’s transition from math-rock to art-metal over the course of the last decade.
Although Brian Aubert, lead singer and guitarist for Silversun Pickups, didn’t take any leaps of faith throughout his set, he and his bandmates did feed off the liveliness of Foals set. The band opened with “Cradle (Better Nature)” from their September release, Better Nature. Aubert began to shred, walking to all areas of the stage so fans at every angle could soak up the magic. Unlike the bands that played before them, Silversun Pickups are not known for stage antics, but rather for their hypnotic melodies that require no other form of expression. All of their music is rife with wild changes in dynamic and unbelievable textures. This show may not lend itself as much to a visual experience as an auditory experience.
The set list included old tracks from back in the mid 2000s, as well as from the band’s most recent release. “Nightlight” was played fourth in the set, and really marked the point in which the crowd started getting involved. The song is edgy and really got everyone’s attention. After this Aubert spoke to the crowd and he seemed at ease, talking to us like he was having a conversation instead of a monologue. After a few minutes of chatting, the band launched back into its set, firing off such jams as “The Pit,” “Friendly Fires,” and “Panic Switch.” The group closed with the 2006 fan favorite “Lazy Eye,” which was a surprise as it toned down the mood of the show, leaving listeners with a sense of closure.
Of course that couldn’t be the end of the show though, and for the encore, the band followed up with “Kissing Families,” “Dots and Dashes (Enough Already),” and “The Wild Kind.” Even though the band is in their fifteenth year of making music, its unique sound is ageless. It was clear from the first song that more than a decade since becoming a band, Silversun Pickups are passionate as ever.