On Tuesday night, the Crescent Ballroom welcomed three acts into its doors on an otherwise mundane evening in Phoenix’s music scene.
By order of appearance and increasing musical prowess, Tempe band Otro Mundo opened followed by A Classic Education from Bologna, Italy, and the feature act Cloud Nothings.
Otro Mundo’s set was fielded by a handful of concertgoers, and A Classic Education was prompt to set up and begin their eight-song set shortly after 8 p.m. The crowd slowly began to multiply and was receptive to the chipper babble of the five-piece Italian group as they shared amusing observations about their trek across the U.S. this year.
A Classic Education joined up with the headlining act in Phoenix for a few dates before they head to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.
Cloud Nothings played nine songs, seven of which were directly translated from the excellent album, “Attack on Memory” released last month.
Due to sickness, the band had to cancel its show in Tucson the previous night, though no one would have known they were fending off a certain affliction if the frontman Dylan Baldi had not been quick to remind the audience of this numerous times.
As a result, Baldi passed some of his vocal duties onto fellow guitarist Joe Boyer when the choruses called for a particularly raspy scream.
The native Ohioans do not outwardly play the part of an over-hyped indie rock band that so many other groups feel they must adopt on tour. They didn’t wear Levi 511s, they didn’t have outlandish haircuts nor did they have an open Pabst Blue Ribbon sitting on each modest amplifier. They very much played the part of a textbook American garage band, albeit enhanced.
By all outward appearances, it looked like the Midwestern four piece was comfortable in their own skin and didn’t very much care what anyone else thought. With that, Cloud Nothings played with an aggressive and cohesive deliberation that was a far cry from their earlier more pop-influenced EPs.
Their performance remained charged throughout the evening, even if the audience, on a wind-scarred Tuesday night in deserted downtown Phoenix, was hopelessly sterile and unwilling to move more than rhythmically sway to the biting guitar lines with each song.
Baldi’s nasal snarl on highlights “Cut You” and “No Sentiment” seemed more like a screamed complaint, as though he expected to see the results of his sung grievances displayed instantaneously.
They closed with “No Future/No Past,” the obvious zenith of “Attack on Memory,” and humbly made their way to manage their merch stand without even hinting at an encore performance. The paltry crowd of around 300 at the Ballroom seemed satiated and obliged.
Reach the reporter at rrocklif@asu.edu
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