Becky Lee and Drunkfoot, Gospel Claws, Electric Touch and Cage the Elephant played a concert at the Modified Arts venue in downtown Phoenix on Sunday night.
With each band, the audience became more and more energetic.
When the third band, Electric Touch, performed, lead singer Shane Lawlor had to stop mid-love song to keep a group of male concertgoers from fighting. By the time Cage the Elephant closed, lead singer Matt Schultz jumped into the audience to sing.
“We watched a little bit of all of the bands,” said Shane Lawlor, lead singer for Electric Touch. “We liked Becky Lee and Drunkfoot, and we thought Cage the Elephant was really energetic.”
ASU students made up a significant part of the rowdy crowd, but not all the moments were as intense as the near fistfight.
“For the most part it was pretty laid back,” said Jessica Beach, a religious studies freshman. “There weren’t too many people there, so you could see and interact with the bands.”
Electric Touch’s lead singer also praised the small venue feel of Sunday’s concert.
“The great thing about playing in clubs is you get to see the whites of people’s eyes, and you get to see people’s reactions,” Lawlor said. “There is a sort of charm in playing in a packed room of 40 or 50 people.”
This past weekend, Cage the Elephant and Electric Touch performed at the Coachella music festival in Indio, Calif.
The two groups will meet again at the All Points West festival in New Jersey on Aug. 1.
“We’d definitely love to come back to Phoenix,” Lawlor said.
“I thought Modified Arts was fantastic, and it’s nice to see a place that seems to cultivate and allow art,” he said. “It seems like a vibrant place; not every city has that kind of creativity.”
Reach the reporter at ivy.morris@asu.edu.
