Light Observation!
26 April, 2012
Webster Hall, New York City, NY
Around 7:30 pm
I got to go to a mosh-style concert for the alternative punk rock band The Wombats. They had two bands as opening acts, the first being an unknown quasi-progress rock band, the second a very loud punk rock band.
Prior to this I had never been to a rock concert before. I’d been in sit-down atmospheres for a couple of my favorite artists, but those had assigned seats. This was a full-on standing room only, potential mosh pit style venue, with loud speakers and crazy concert lights. With all of this, before the Wombats came on stage, before their opening acts, before anything but radio music was playing and people were only just filtering in, I was in a perpetual state of wide-eyed excitement. As an overall experience, it was wonderful. It was loud and crazy and busy and I felt the bass in my chest and the movement of the floor. I was with good friends listening to wonderfully blaring and fantastic music, and all of this pretty much carried on throughout.
While I am an avid fan of the Wombats, I was a lot more impressed by the first opening act (whose name I conveniently cannot remember), a watered-down progressive rock band a la Coldplay and Young the Giant, though with slightly less enunciation. For their set, they had four giant light bulbs on stage, set up between instruments and band members, mostly surrounding the drummer (as he was center stage). Before they started playing my friend and I were somewhat confused as to what they were exactly – it was pretty dark and we only saw lights glinting off of the bulbs because they weren’t on yet. But then when they started playing their music, when it got super loud and fast and busy and energetic, the lightbulbs went off and on to the beat. Flashes of muted amber went off with the other LEDs and moving lights in the theatre, completely drawing you in trance-like to the music and sucking your focus almost primarily to the beat of the drums amidst the loud and full music coming from the band as a whole.