By Nestor Diaz

Only one word can describe the show last week’s at the Velvet Lounge: massive. It was an evening filled with waves of noise and epic passages. The Plums, an experimental/instrumental group out of Arlington, set the tone for the night with their slow-building, perfectly thought out pieces having us all wondering where they’ll be taking us over the course of their set. Being down one member for this particular show, there were no signs that they were sonically strained. That’s how solid these guys are. Weaving and twisting sounds out of your standard rock outfit (drums, guitar, and bass), they applied the space age tinge of synth and laptop textures to fill out their organic sounds.

The Velvet Lounge always extends a welcome hand to a good deal of avant garde and experimental groups that come by the district. So it was a pleasure that they opened their doors for the high point of the evening, Yndi Halda. These guys are a post rock outfit hailing from Canterbury, England. When you have a band crossing the pond for a tour in these here United States, they better mean business. Yndi Halda did not disappoint. Combining such elements as folk songwriting, shoegaze density, and post-rock scale, they gave a grandiose, feature-length-quality performance. The evening was closed out by local experimental/noise group, Dark Sea Dream. They stayed true to their name, providing a live show that swept the audience away in a deluge of sound. Only a three piece, they did a wonderful job creating complex and thoughtful sonic layers in their live performance.