Hinds
The Spin trucked down to Exit/In on Sunday night expecting a show toward the chill end of the spectrum. Despite a healthy catalog of solo albums, Albert Hammond Jr. is best known as the guitarist from The Strokes, the band that every suburban kid we knew got into after riding Weezer’s wave of emotionally driven and pop-conscious rock as far as it would go. That was 17 years ago, and many of those kids now have responsibilities that include being at work by 9 a.m. on Monday. And as our photog pointed out, The Strokes have never been the most raucous band live, letting their kinetic tunes (and sometimes a light show) do the dazzling. What we got at Exit/In was a dance-rock calisthenic whirlwind punctuated by Hammond pausing after a crowd surfer got busted to gently poke fun at the “No Stage Diving” signs: “I feel like we’re in Footloose or something,” he said, with the slightest hint of Rodney Dangerfield.
Hinds
But before we get to that, let’s talk about Hinds. The last time we saw the quartet, they were playing an evening slot at Bonnaroo just a couple of hours after the flight from their native Spain landed in Nashville. It was 3 a.m. by their internal clocks, and they played the perfect closing-time set, a jovial mess of garage rock that exploded on the stage like a tallboy in a paint shaker, reflecting what we heard in their early singles and their debut album Leave Me Alone.
Two weeks out from the April 6 release of their second album I Don’t Run, the band showcased much more precision and polish without sacrificing any of the energy that makes them stupendous fun. They’ve used their experience to find a sweet spot where they can pull off more complex arrangements and write songs like “The Club” that explore complicated relationships with friends, romantic partners and themselves in greater depth — while doing goofy dances during their cover of Kevin Ayers’ “Caribbean Moon.” They closed their set with Hammond and his entire band onstage for a foaming-over cover of Thee Headcoatees’ “Louie Louie”-inspired “Davey Crockett.”
Albert Hammond Jr.
A little later, the “You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!” segment of The Doors’ “The Soft Parade” let us know that the main event was about to commence, and we ducked back inside from the patio where we were cooling down. Hammond and band filed in with big grins and just the right amount of swagger to kick things off. Hammond’s new LP Francis Trouble has only been out a few weeks, and while he played plenty of material from it, the set drew from all four of his solo albums as well as various EPs and singles — highly danceable and punky in a way that reveals Strokes in its DNA, but confident in heading off in other directions of Hammond’s choosing.
Balancing the set between songs that fans already knew and new tunes was a subtle example of Hammond’s expertise in showmanship. A more obvious one was his constant motion. He leaped and bounded and careened from stage left to stage right and from the drum riser to the balcony and back, giving his mic Daltrey-esque twirls and pausing to take just one fierce guitar solo, leaving the shredding to his bandmates while he handed out high-fives and crooned his anthemic and cathartic numbers. On the set-closer "In Transit," Hinds returned his earlier favor and came back out to party, along with one exuberant audience member.
Albert Hammond Jr.
The house was about two-thirds full, and the folks down front were some of the most enthusiastic we’ve heard in a minute, calling for more songs before the band even left the stage. By the time the encore ended on the Francis cut “Muted Beatings,” we were pretty well satisfied that we’d gotten the best of both worlds: the melodic rock-history-indebted sensibilities of The Strokes with Hammond’s sweat-drenched skill at selling it.
See our slideshow for more photos.
In The Spin — the Scene's live review column — staffers and freelance contributors review concerts under a collective byline.
