The greatest trick the best bands ever pull is convincing every audience that they’re their favorites. It’s no easy feat. The road is monotonous, every club starts to look the same, one sea of bobbing heads becomes indistinguishable from the next. Generally, when you say you’re just thrilled to be here in Washington, D.C. tonight, we usually know that you’re following a routine, a script, and hoping that you filled in the blank with the right city. But when a band gets it right, either through Oscar-worthy acting, or just good old-fashioned sincerity, the crowd is in their pocket.
Such was the case last night with Matt and Kim. The two-person, beat-heavy, synth-pop Brooklyn duo whipped the gathering crowd into a dance-ready mood with a frenetic half hour set during which singer/keyboardist/lead hyperactive Matt Johnson must have gone out of his way to let the crowd know at least a half dozen times just how honored and excited and happy and just plain jumpin’-out-of-his-skin thrilled he was to be in Washington on this particular Monday night. It should have come off as corny, but the ear-to-ear grins that both he and Kim wore for the entirety of their set made you believe. You’ve never seen two people so elated to be on a stage.
Kim was like a flesh and blood incarnation of the Muppets’ Animal, or maybe Keith Moon’s long-lost little sister, wildly flailing arms and irrepressible exuberance, yet somehow she kept a rock-solid thumping beat through it all. And while we’re assigning children’s character totems, Matt did a more than passable Tigger, bouncing off the floor like there were springs in his legs, practically doing headstands on his keyboard, and punching the air so hard it seemed entirely conceivable he might scrape his knuckles on the 9:30’s high ceilings. By the time they launched into the opening keyboard riff of Europe’s cheese-tastic classic “The Final Countdown” near the end, they had the crowd believing so hard there were actually people disappointed that they didn’t cover the song in its entirety.
This might have been a hard act to follow, if not for the fact that the act that was following was Cut Copy.
