Mi Ami by Dr Pelter

Saturday night’s show at The Smell felt real.

Foot Village didn’t so much play their tens of drums as lovingly, joyfully, expertly abuse them. The sole unit of amplification was a megaphone that functioned more as a cute, occasionally remembered accessory to their jugular-swelling screaming than any kind of appreciable sound enhancement; sort of like how the long-haired guy’s shirt was more like a mildly useful sweat rag rather than actual clothing. They made you not care about the nosebleed you might get from being accidentally head-butted by one of the twenty people thrashing around you in a brutal tribal ceremony from a post-apocalyptic world in which a ring of drums with an electric constellation woven through them wrote our new communal history and taught us about our lost one.

In this new world a boy with an amiable face and a sweep of brown hair that looks, from the neck up, like the plucky-but-humble hero of a teenage detective novel can make a band out of almost erotically uncomfortable shrieking, mesmerizingly precise beats, and sometimes sparkling bright, alternately warbling and crunchy bass and guitar. Mi Ami had the young ones in a tizzy, leaving them searching for people to shove with yearning, sweaty looks as singer (and teen detective) Daniel Martin-McCormick obligingly careened into them every so often.

The feverish daze in which Foot Village and Mi Ami left the loyal denizens of The Smell’s new, smell-less tomorrow was a perfect segue into Lucky Dragons’ ethereal midnight dream. These green bean tall wizards of sound brought their usual array of mundane objects transformed into musical toys for the audience with kaleidoscopic cord/wands and the wonders of capacitance and sound waves. The paparazzi-like flash photo coverage of their every jerk and sway was distracting, to put it politely, but it couldn’t dilute the enveloping pulses and drones and cascades of the electronic thunderstorms they made to replace the ones we just lost.

—Ayse Arf