Lake Street Dive Bowls Over Westville

For Lake Street Dive, concerts in New Haven this Thursday and Friday night mark the end of an era of musical magic.

For New Haven, they mark the beginning of a new one.

The band (commonly referred to as ​“LSD”) is in the midst of playing the two concerts at the new Westville Music Bowl (aka The Venue Formerly Known As The Connecticut Tennis Center). At last check, tickets were still available for Friday night’s show.

Based on Thursday night’s performance, it’s a show worth checking out.

The two shows offer a last look at the band with all the original members from its first 17 years: Friday night is the final performance including trumpeter/guitarist and founding member Mike ​“McDuck” Olson (pictured), who is leaving the group.

The shows also offered one of the first looks (in addition to this one) at ways the Music Bowl offers such a welcomed addition to New Haven’s live-music scene.

With its distinctive beats, soulful harmonies, catchy tunes and lyrics, tight arrangements, and frontwoman Rachael Price’s powerful vocals and infectious stage presence, LSD is made for live performance. Including outdoor concerts.

But it takes the right kind of outdoor venue to bring out the band’s greatest strength: an understated intimacy that fuels its distinctive updated spin on 1960s-‘70s-style rhythmic, heartfelt, jazz-inflected pop (with echoes of Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Hall and Oates, the Beatles, the Staples Singers …).

Their magic transpires when they hover close together, lean into each other, respond to each other’s moves, with percussion stripped down and handheld, the trumpet tiptoeing rather than blasting into empty spaces, Price summoning the seed of a single note and massaging and stretching it, all along a framework insistently constructed by Bridget Kearney on the upright bass. Each beat, each note carries its weight, blending into a greater whole.

Fans are perhaps most familiar with how they did that on a sidewalk to create a quiet new song out of the Jackson Five classic ​“I Want You Back,” as captured in the above decade-old video. Not surprisingly, it was their encore Thursday night, with people singing, swaying, dancing along from the grass pit by the stage to the concourse by the beer stand.

The highlight of the concert, at least for this attendee, was when the band took a break from its full-volume rock numbers. The members left their distanced perches to assemble within inches of each other by the microphone, instrumentation stripped down, for several quieter numbers, their blending voices and instrumental artistry speaking louder than a mountain of amplifiers. The mini-set included an uplifting rendition of the Staples’ ​“I’m Just A Soldier (in the army of love)” and a transporting take on one of their best songs, the Kearney-penned ​“Neighbor Song,” a rumination that begins with hearing ​“my neighbors making love upstairs” to how

In this city all the humans live in layers/
I got people down the hall and down the stairs/
We all move in and out and live our lives in stacks and rows and pairs/
And try to find someone with whom we can share it.

The moment had extra intimacy, extra power because of where it took place: Outdoors, where the sun had set and the spotlit darkness brought the band closer to the audience. With a sound system loud enough to envelop the listener, but clear and not-too-loud enough to render the lyrics and harmonies distinct.

This was how this music was meant to be felt, understood. Especially in an era when recorded music is so often consumed via smaller and smaller devices.

LSD, reinvigorated with the contributions of its relatively new member, keyboardist and vocalist Akie Bermiss, has a bright future ahead of it.

As does the Westville Music Bowl.