1. After two nights and three different shows of larger-than-usual crowds at Brooklyn Bowl, which wisely took advantage of acts routing through the western states for this weekend’s Outside Lands festival in San Francisco, a more modest crowd surfaced for Australian synth pop act Cut Copy, despite a free-ticket giveaway earlier in the week by the ItsOnMe app. However, those who did show up—nearly filling the GA floor beneath the stage, and leaving the bar areas and balcony almost empty—were fully engaged through the entirety of the 75-minute performance. Ironically, there was more actual dancing happening for this live band than what typically happens at Strip megaclubs during a DJ performance.
2. Cut Copy gave the audience good reason to cut loose. Though the quartet occasionally indulged in some guitar freakouts and jangle jams (especially the loud riff dirge at the end of the ’60s throwback “Where I’m Going,” seguing into the schizo glam of “So Haunted”), it chiefly focused on its signature high-energy, four-on-the-floor dance anthems. Climaxing crowd-pleasers like opener “We are Explorers” and the piano-led “Take Me Higher”—both from last year’s Free Your Mind—enthusiastically paid homage to both Britain’s pre-grunge “Summer of Love” period and the early 1990s East Coast club scene. 2008’s “Out There On the Ice” peaked with comparable zeal and payoff, though skewing more toward the soundtrack of early American rave culture. And encore number “Need You Know” took its fine, pop-convention-bucking time to arrive at its final, goose-pimpling chorus—imagine an “I Feel Love” for the electro-rock set, with the foursome locked in and throwing itself into the song’s performance almost as much as the crowd was throwing itself into the air.
3. It’s hard to lose yourself completely to Cut Copy’s music without acknowledging—and sometimes grimacing through—its chronic artistic derivation and unabashedly trite lyricism. With regards to the former, the band is never too far away from another, no matter which song it’s playing. During “Hearts on Fire,” I kept hearing New Order, from singer Dan Whitford’s Bernard Sumner-like delivery to the quartet’s mid-song instrumental flurries and stretched outros. As for the latter, Whitford doesn’t mess with metaphors or subtext. Like Madonna, he resorts to the most obvious and general pop-song proclamations—dated romantic proclamations like “let’s keep holding onto love” and “be my baby one more time,” or rote hippie musings exhorting us to “shine brighter than the sun.” Occasionally such hokiness begat queasiness. However, the unfailingly melodic and escapist moments proved too irresistible most of the time, overcoming the shortcomings. And unlike Chromeo’s over-the-top display the night before, Cut Copy was mercifully schtick-free, a few psychedelic screensaver-like visuals aside.
4. Best distraction: Early in the performance, a wedding party took over one of the balconies, lined up over the rail to dance and groove along, and nearly stole the show from the band. Not to be outdone, two other male-and-female parties decked out in casual summer whites and bridal dresses infiltrated the dance-floor area. Maybe Whitford’s lovey-dovey declarations make Cut Copy the ultimate wedding band.
5. Even with a turnout that wasn’t in danger of breaking fire code, Friday’s Cut Copy show still ended one of the most interesting weeks of Brooklyn Bowl’s five-month-old existence. It demonstrated that the Linq venue wasn’t solely dedicated to the booking of jam bands and traditional music acts. It also showed that DJs didn’t have an exclusive domain over electronic music on the Strip. It finally experimented with a calendar that was more like that of its more adventurously programmed predecessor back east. And it proved that Las Vegas deserved a place on the tour schedules of international acts—last week saw one from England, one from Canada and two from Australia—that normally stick to festivals like Coachella and bigger American cities. Disclosure, Flume, Cut Copy and Chromeo may not have come this week if it hadn’t been for Outside Lands, but now they might come back regardless of any bigger destination.
