The fourth installment of Boston Calling, the multiday music festival held at City Hall Plaza, has a pleasantly varied lineup - reunited rockers and indie stalwarts share downtown with chart-topping singers and culture-jamming party music. Friday night's opening show, with sets by the high-grade Brooklyn band The National, the renewed Athens menagerie Neutral Milk Hotel, and the dynamic Baltimore outfit Future Islands, was a crowd-pleasing night of rock that hinged on white-hot emotion and a willingness to muck up smoothness.
The textures laid down by Future Islands shimmer like the past's ideas of 2014; frontman Samuel T. Herring transforms those gleaming surfaces into something slightly more raw, singing in a deeply felt croon that shape-shifts into the type of guttural howl one would expect to hear over death metal. On Friday, his captivating dance moves contained enough sweep that they dazzled all the way to the back of the crowd; more importantly, they got people to move along with him.
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In 1998 Neutral Milk Hotel released In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, an ambitious, cacophonic album filled with striking imagery and odes to Anne Frank. Shortly after the band broke up, and a curious thing happened: Aeroplane became not just a cult classic but a touchstone album. Neutral Milk Hotel leader Jeff Mangum's occasional solo sets turned into a full-on reunion tour last year, and the combination of his buzzsaw voice with his gloriously chaotic band - brass and strings, plus the arsenal of multi-instrumentalist Julian Koster - still packs an emotional wallop. A few festivalgoers flouted the band's request to pocket their cellphones, but that did little to dim the passion behind the urgent 'Ghost' or the veering 'Song Against Sex.'
The National, returning to the Boston Calling stage after headlining its inaugural run, represent a new guard in indie, their precisely calibrated art-rock filling large spaces - like, say, the kind where multiday, multiband festivals happen. While much of their music has a persistent mopiness, the dynamics underneath captivate, with release provided in pieces; a bit of pealing brass, a yawp from lead singer Matt Beringer. Near the end, Beringer jumped into the crowd, and was nearly lost among the front-row throng; when he returned to the stage, he led a hushed version of the folky 'Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks' punctuated by him dropping his mic to let the crowd sing. It was more like church than a rock show, but it was a promising beginning to the most ambitious Boston Calling yet.
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City Hall Plaza,
Also performing:The National, Neutral Milk Hotel, Future IslandsDate of concert:Friday
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Maura K. Johnston can be reached at maura@maura.com. Entities 0 Name: Boston Calling Count: 2 1 Name: Boston Count: 2 2 Name: City Hall Plaza Count: 1 3 Name: Athens Count: 1 4 Name: Jeff Mangum Count: 1 5 Name: Brooklyn Count: 1 6 Name: Samuel T. Herring Count: 1 7 Name: Beringer Count: 1 8 Name: Julian Koster Count: 1 9 Name: Matt Beringer Count: 1 10 Name: Anne Frank Count: 1 11 Name: Neutral Milk Hotel Count: 1 12 Name: Maura K. Johnston Count: 1 13 Name: Baltimore Count: 1 Related Keywords 0 Name: maura Score: 25 1 Name: milk Score: 24 2 Name: neutral Score: 23 3 Name: music Score: 23 4 Name: beringer Score: 20 5 Name: multiday Score: 18 6 Name: festival Score: 18 7 Name: hotel Score: 18 8 Name: band Score: 18 9 Name: aeroplane Score: 17 Authors Media Images 0
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