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When a band is finishing up their tour, one of two things tend to happen. The band will either completely cash in the performance due to exhaustion or really give the audience a set to remember. Honestly, Brooklyn's White Rabbits probably could've phoned in the performance and due to the strength of the material on last year's breakout album Fort Nightly and nobody would've been able to tell. However, when they started the set with their percussion-heavy and unreleased track "Sea of Rome," and singer/keyboardist Stephen Patterson, picked up the drumsticks, his face read that there was nothing he'd rather be doing.
The Black Cat, which had seemed rather empty just minutes before experienced a sudden rush toward the stage as the band went into the tap-happy "While We Go Dancing", paying tribute to their tour opener Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson by all wearing their t-shirts. As tight as the drumming sounds on their album, the energy exhibited by dueling drummers Matt Clark and Jamie Levinson blows their recorded work out of the water, especially since the beats always seem complementary, making the audience dance, but never producing excess noise.
The singers also kept that complementary aesthetic for as Patterson turned red-faced as he pounded the keys and occasionally screamed out the lyrics, the guitar-playing singer, Greg Roberts, looked stoic in comparison; rarely showing emotion in his face, saving it for the dark harmonies he shared with Patterson.
Although the openers Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson had gained the respect of the headliners, they failed to fully impress the early arrivers at the Black Cat. It's not that they were bad per se, or even that they had unfortunate influences. On the contrary, Miles Anthony Benjamin Robinson sounded like they'd taken Vampire Weekend's rhythm section and These United States' vocals and combined them. Who knew Vampire Weekend had even been around long enough to have copycats? However, the magnetism of Jesse Elliott and the fun aspects of VW were completely lost as this band's initially promising set dragged to its finish.
White Rabbits, however, stayed strong until the end. While the audience loudly sang along to the "whoa whoa whoas" during "The Plot" and stamped their feet to "Kid on My Shoulders" — the two clear high points of the set — even their less familiar tracks, like the new unreleased "The Foxhunter" emitted a sort of magnetism. In this way, title track "Fort Nightly" may have been the most impressive as it started off with the cool and seductive harmonies which built into a faster swirling cacophony, like one's thoughts during a night of heavy drinking.
In the middle of the encore which consisted of the noisy "Walk Around the Table" and a cover of Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm," Patterson said that he couldn't think of a better crowd to have for the final night of the tour (although they'd been rooting against the Nationals earlier that day as they're originally from St. Louis). White Rabbits put on the kind of performance that would make a fan out of a nonbeliever.
Photo by Andrew Droz Palermo from the band's MySpace page.
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The link should point to http://www.whiterabbitsmusic.com
Actually, the song's title is "Sea of Rum."
i thought the white rabbits set was pretty short. did i miss something, or was it just because they're at the end of the tour and wanted to hurry up and get home?