Some bands are just better than others at reducing the barrier between band and audience. Sometimes it’s by engaging specific audience members in conversation, like Ted Leo, or actually playing in the middle of the floor, like Dan Deacon and a couple of his other F Yeah compatriots. The Mae Shi, who actually played alongside Dan Deacon for Whartscape Festival this past weekend, share that same philosophy of engaging the audience by moving amongst them. They do this better than most, and before the end of their set, they had brought the audience, literally, to their knees.

Simply calling The Mae Shi “experimental” or “noise-rock” would be selling the Los Angeles quartet short. True, they are very loud and for stretches of their set, it was impossible to tell what exactly Jon Gray was shrieking. But relying strongly on material from this year’s HLLLYH, the band mixed a good bit of actual melodies (on a synthesizer no less) and rock riffs in with all of the noise. That’s part of the brilliance of the Mae Shi; they can take an established song format and rather than throw all of the rules out the window, they keep what they like and distort what they don’t, which allowed for one of those other band and audience barrier-breakers: the sing-a-long.