Last Friday night, Circa Survive hosted an exhilarating night of music at the Pearl Street ballroom in Northampton. The show was one of the last stops on the Doylestown, Pa. outfit’s nationwide tour in promotion of its 2010 album “Blue Sky Noise.”
Opening the festivities was Sleeper Agent, a fresh-faced six-piece indie rock group from Bowling Green, Ky. Sleeper Agent betrayed its namesake by jolting Pearl Street’s growing crowd to life with its brand of reckless power pop given the garage punk treatment.
Halfway through the set, lead singer Alex Kandel riled up the crowd a bit further by promising that, if everyone started dancing, she would let Circa Survive lead singer Anthony Green taze her. While it seemed like an offhand joke at first, immediately following the band’s next song, Green strolled onstage wielding a crackling stun gun and, with full consent from the young rockers, sent 250 volts of electricity through Kandel’s ribcage and bassist Lee Williams’ butt.
The band somehow still managed to finish strong, making way for Chicago natives Maps & Atlases to take the stage. Maps & Atlases delivered a tightly woven set filled to the brim with virtuoso percussion, complex dual guitar tapping and math-folk jamming. Of particular note was drummer Chris Hainey, who played the kit like Jimi Hendrix played rhythm guitar – as if three different people were playing the instrument at once.
By the time Circa Survive nonchalantly crept onto the darkened stage, the air was thick with musical perspiration and rampant anticipation. Opening with an incendiary rendition of “Get Out,” the smash lead single from the “Blue Sky Noise” album, the band kicked things off with a bang and rarely let up the pace throughout the evening.
Anyone who attends a Circa Survive concert can be sure of at least one thing: Green is a human dynamo of a rock and roll frontman. Known for his high singing voice and difficult vocal compositions, he is uncompromising live. Every throat-shredding chorus, every stratosphere-shattering high note – Green miraculously hits every single one of them. Anatomically speaking, human vocal cords shouldn’t be able to do what Green’s do every night for two hours on end. Yet when Green belts out tunes like the rousing fan favorite “Stop The F*ckin’ Car,” his pristine and soaring vocals are nothing short of euphoria inducing.
Of course, Circa’s music is nothing without the textured twin-guitar melodies of axemen Colin Frangicetto and Brendan Ekstrom. Weaving and bobbing around the visceral grooves laid down by drummer Steve Clifford, the pair of guitarists exchange jagged rhythm patterns and blissful leads and solos, effortlessly painting the melodic counterpoint to Green’s vocal motif. Bassist Nick Beard, while expertly holding down the electric smooth low end, also contributes fantastic harmony vocals, lending an ethereal quality to the already multidimensional Circa live experience.
For most of the set, the band dug into the rich reserves of its earlier albums, pulling out all the classic Circa Survive jams. Numbers such as “In Fear And Faith” from its debut album “Juturna” and “In The Morning And Amazing” from its definitive 2007 release “On Letting Go” had every pair of lips in the house flapping along to the lyrics.
Circa Survive certainly knew how to keep the audience right in the palm of its hand. For practically the entire show, the area in front of the stage was jammed with fans crowd surfing, vaulting over each other and even standing on each other’s shoulders just to get closer to the stage. During a surging performance of its seminal hit “The Difference Between Medicine And Poison Is The Dose,” the band’s crew released a half dozen super-sized black beach balls into the crowd that, when popped, were filled with confetti.
Green faced the tempest of writhing human flesh without batting an eye – or missing a note – and often immersed himself into the throng while performing. He wasn’t singing to the crowd; he was singing with them. When one fan got a little too touchy with the vocalist, Green playfully dragged him onstage in a headlock and tossed him back into the sea of hands with one arm.
While most of its set was filled with nonstop heavy rock, Circa slowed things down for a couple songs. The back to back ballads “Sleep Underground” – a song released only as a demo on its “Appendage” EP – and “Frozen Creek” both showed the softer side of the Circa Survive spectrum, transitioning from a ravaging and thrashing torrent to a gentle, sultry sway. As Green heart-wrenchingly crooned, “’Cause it’s all built upon a burial ground … Atop the frozen creek/I would love to take you there,” Circa managed to shrink a packed ballroom into an intimate and emotional affair.
After Circa ended its main set with “Stop The F*ckin’ Car” and left the stage, the audience immediately screamed for more and began chanting “one more song” in unison. Shortly thereafter, Green took the stage and informed the crowd that they had “exceeded [his] expectations of weirdness and awesomeness,” and he profusely thanked both the audience and the two opening acts. Wishing Sleeper Agent a safe flight home, Green welcomed the band back onstage for the show-closing number “I Felt Free” from the “Blue Sky Noise” album. While they began the song in a relatively subdued and subtle manner, they positively exploded into the second half, riding the epic dual guitar solo into the swell of the transcendent final chorus, creating the perfect crescendo climax to an evening of musical sublimity.
Dave Coffey can be reached at [email protected].
