Purchase Alumni Perform at L Magazine’s Northside Festival

The air was dark and thick with layers of smoke and the smell of booze-sweat oozing through denim. Saturday night, the official third night of the L Magazine’s Northside Festival, Purchase alumni band, Woods, performed at Williamsburg’s The Shank with Kurt Vile and the Violators, Grooms, and Blues Control. The show was sponsored by the over-self-referential label Less Artists More Condos and free Colt-45’s were provided by VICE magazine.

Woods, although pleasing acid-folk-fuzzy garage rock in audio, performed an underwhelming set to an over enthusiastic free-45 injected, young, hip, smokey crowd. G. Lucas Crane seizured, moaning and warbling into his rewired headphones and harmonizing with band-leader Jeremy Earl’s high-end vocals. Upon hearing Woods for the first time a few months back, I was under the common-held assumption that this was a female/male fronted band as opposed to a man/man/electronics band, as it were.

Despite Wood’s enjoyable low-fi-folk-psych sound, the show, especially in the dense humidity, failed to outshine a casual LP listen. (Especially due to the technical failures during “Rain On,” arguably their best song). I wanted to be wowed, and simply was not. My fellow alumni failed to exceed in execution the excitement and energy of their sound. I believe fellow Purchase alumni-now-Brooklyn-resident (unique!) Brendan Byrne said it best: “There was nothing bad about that show, but there was nothing good about it either.”

Looking around at all the soaked through flannel, the mullets, the rat tails, the sleeveless zip-up hoodies, the vintage high waists and wasted youth; sweat poured down my back as sweet warm malt liquor poured down my throat and Earl’s sang, “and it feels like it should today,” and the sweaty, sticky, apathetic hipness at DIY space The Shank felt exactly like it should.

In contrast, Grooms followed Woods with a fun, sway inducing and musically rapturous set. Their riffs were catchy but still sounded just a bit dangerous, as DIY rock should. But in the great heat my energy was spent and I evacuated the crowd, catapulted to the misty rain and the humid pavement and out into another Williamsburg night.