“Woah! Who likes to dance?” Sharkmuffin’s Tarra Thiessen asked from the front of a swelling, red-bathed crowd. The audience responded with enthusiastic whoops and hollers. Thiessen’s denim cutoffs gleamed and rippled as the light dipped to turquoise. Taking it as some sort of divine sign, she ventured further into the clump of bodies, heat radiating from where she stood.
Audience members orbited around her as she repeated the question. Do you like to dance? An enthusiastic nod and attempt at three drunken dance steps. And you, do you like to dance? Another emphatic, swaying yes. The room waited eagerly for her to dip back into a punk-pop siren song it hadn’t heard before.
Lucy Gellman Photo
Wednesday night, this celebratory four hour dance-party-meets-mosh-pit-meets-crowd-surf set the tone for BAR’s free midweek lineup, featuring If Jesus Had Machine Guns, Sharkmuffin, and headliner Ports of Spain. To celebrate the kickoff of Ports of Spain’s multistate summer tour, the three bands tore up BAR’s back room, bringing an energy to the place that left the audience, ears ringing through midmorning, screaming for more.
There are lots of reasons why. The gorgeous, reverb-drenched baby of Sam Carlson and Ilya Gitelman, Ports of Spain plays the kind of music that goes straight for the bone. Think Black Keys meets Real Estate, and add a particular predilection for head-banging, crowd-jostling, Jon-Stone-juggling rowdy dancing, and you’re getting close. On drums and vocals, Carlson is a New Haven treasure. If it seems like you’ve seen him play in 20-something New Haven bands, that’s probably because you have. He was in full form Wednesday, inventive on the drums and fresh on the vocals as he switched from If Jesus Had Machine Guns to the headlining act. Working octave pedals and loops, Gitelman dazzled alongside him, keeping the crowd electrified as they dove into a wide-awake set.
A kickoff like that doesn’t happen alone. Largely owing to front man Jimi Patterson, If Jesus Had Machine Guns got the audience rocking out in style, a mass of warm, shoulder-to-shoulder bodies moving toward the front of the room as the band launched into pieces like “devil knows.”
If you haven’t seen Patterson perform, get up from your desk and find a way to right now. He is a dynamo, a blessedly possessed soul. If a young David Byrne, Madonna, and half of c. 2010 Kanye West had stupefying sex with in the fifth circle of hell, that might be a start. On keyboard and vocals, Katelyn Marshall both leveled out and fed Patterson’s frenzied style. Jay Sirianni, Chris Serapiglia, Jay Bates, and Jon Watanabe ably mustered the band’s robust, deliciously jarring sound.
Sharkmuffin kept the momentum going with their brand of “feminist pop-punk,” Thiessen thrilling the audience as Natalie Kirch (bass and vocals) and Sharif Mekawy (drums) held down the foundation. While Patterson’s brand of “Dream Pop meet Robocop” called for one kind of dancing, Sharkmuffin’s called for another, the crowd swinging and bumping wildly as the group performed pieces from their forthcoming LP Chartreuse, the first single off which is based on a bad Tinder date. Sound ripe for potential? Yeah, it was.
Then it was time for Ports of Spain. Carlson broke into a huge, goofy, knowing grin midway into the band’s first number. Gitleman shot him a glance and nodded, the corners of his mouth rising. It was the kind of moment in which you just knew: that joy is going to get them through the whole damn tour.
To find out more about Ports of Spain, visit their website. To find out more about events at BAR, visit their calendar.