Divine Fits at Ace of Cups

I gotta admit, I’m a big Sam Brown fan. He’s the sole reason I was excited about this band and this show. First with the New Bomb Turks, then later I got into Gaunt (which is kinda backwards, since he was in Gaunt before the Turks; but hey, these things happen) and I just got The Sun’s DVD on Friday, but have yet to check it out. I actually didn’t know Brown was in The Sun when I purchased it. Funny how things work out sometimes.

Lets be clear; there is a lot of buzz about this band. Pitchfork and Rolling Stone both have hard-ons for the Divine Fits… and they haven’t even released an album yet. They’re being called a “super group,” which I find amusing because the vast majority of people haven’t heard of any of the band the members have been in. Expectations among the elitists are high, so how were those expectations met?

Opening band was Connections. They played indie-pop, have 4-6 members, and that’s about all I can tell you. I didn’t pay them enough attention to give an accurate assessment. Perhaps in the future.

The Divine Fits…

The lads (calling a band, “the lads,” is a music writer cliche) looked like they had a lot of fun on stage. Which is always nice, because music is emotional and the emotions of a band come out in their performance.

Dan Boekner (of Wolf Parade and Handsome Furs) did most of the singing and interplay with the audience. After the first song, he named dropped Brown and the crowd cheered (as they damn well should). After that, there wasn’t a whole lot of talking other than Boekner happily exclaiming that this was the band’s fifth show ever.

Speaking of Boekner; the best word to physically describe him is “spindly.” After the Divine Fits finished, they left the stage and walked past me; Boekner happily slapped me on the back as he passed and I was slightly worried his arm might break off.

I’m not knocking the guy; he seemed genuinely happy to be there, playing in this little club for 150 people. That’s really cool.

Divine Fits played around 12 songs; which is short considering the longest song they played was a cover of Tom Petty’s “You Got Lucky.” Or maybe it just seemed short because I was having a good time?

Musically, the songs reminded me a lot of Spoon, which is Britt Daniel’s regular gig. This surprised me because the two singles that have been released don’t sound anything like Spoon. 

Okay, so here’s the skinny; The band enjoyed themselves. The audience enjoyed themselves.

For 15 bucks, I believe I got my money’s worth.

Author: everloss

I'm a dude that writes about stuff on the internet.

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