Live Review: F Yeah Tour

ONE WOULD EXPECT a certain amount of chaos from something called the F Yeah Tour, which staggered into the Black Cat on Wednesday night.

Inspired by the Los Angeles art and music festival of the same name, the tour was headlined by 2007 blog superstar Dan Deacon, featured similarly hyperactive bands such as Matt & Kim, Monotonix and The Death Set, and will likely have reviewers such as myself trying to think of lots of different ways to say "spastic."

There was definitely no shortage of fist pumping, jumping, shimmying and shouting. Visibility was harder to come by. That's because the majority of the acts didn't bother using the stage, instead choosing to set up shop right in front of it, or sometimes directly in the middle of the audience. It made for an evening of massive audience participation and if you didn't happen to be right in the middle of things to see what was going on, no need for concern. (With a good percentage of the audience wielding cameras and cell phones, a quick search of Flickr or YouTube ought to fill in the blanks.)

Openers The Mannequin Men seemed strikingly traditional compared with their tour mates. The group performed on stage, feature a standard two guitars, bass and drums rock lineup, and write straightforward songs about girls, school, and massages. Only on the F Yeah tour would those qualities make a band seem distinctive.

Brooklyn's Team Robespierre quickly established the participatory tone of the evening, immediately summoning the crowd to surround the band's setup and exhorting the audience to dance. The fans obliged, and the band performed a high energy set, veering between dance-punk and synthesizer-based songs.

Tel Aviv trio Monotonix was indisputably the highlight of the evening. The group's '70s-influenced hard rock was appealing, but their live antics were unforgettable. During the 25-minute set singer Ami Shalev covered most of the audience in beer, climbed atop both bars, removed his shirt, then one Adidas sneaker and one sock. He then put the shirt and sock down his pants and groped himself before drinking beer out of the sneaker, stealing two hats from audience members, draping his body over drummer Gever, draping a female audience member's body on Gever and perching two barstools on Gever's head. Shalev then made a flying leap into a trash can and moved the drum kit to three different locations, which culminated in audience members lifting the kick drum into the air with Gever perched atop it, still playing the snare and cymbal.

Monotonix are a hard act to follow, but Baltimore's The Death Set did its best to sustain the energy level. The visibility problems were in effect again, but the band's fusion of samples, drum machine and anthemic punk was fully audible.

Matt & Kim, a synthesizer-and-drum duo from Brooklyn, opted to perform onstage but managed to keep the crowd engaged with their infectious dance pop. While other bands occasionally requested that the crowd dance or sing, Matt & Kim had completely unsolicited handclap accompaniment help on nearly every song. Their set closing version of "Yea Yeah" (with lyrics tweaked to suit the tour name) would have made a fine end to the evening.

Dan Deacon, making his only scheduled appearance on the tour, brought the audience involvement to a new level. Although his live performances regularly include storytelling interludes and audience sing-alongs, Deacon tweaked his usual camp-counselor role and instead acted more as a bar mitzvah emcee, leading a very cooperative crowd through various collective dances.

Chaos seemed inevitable following the frantic moshing to Deacon's first manic electronic pop offering, "Crystal Cat", but the electronica nerd-king soon took control. He took advantage of the Cat's large space and less-than-capacity audience, directing the crowd through a high-five jogging circle and a "dance gauntlet" that resembled a giant game of London Bridge.

As with much of the evening, the musical element of the performance might not have been too memorable, but the spectacle more than compensated.

Written by Express contributor Meg Zamula

Dan Deacon photo by Ray Roy; Monotonix courtesy Monotonix