Telekinesis! at the Black Cat 6/17

Somehow, someway, I wasn't actually the first person among my friends to find this band. They put out an album on Merge in April. And I didn't hear about them until around then. But MBG came in to work one day and said, "My new favorite band is on Merge." So I got the album and he was right. It's the best thing I've heard this year. There isn't one single bad track, and therefore no real standouts, as "Tokyo", "Coast of Carolina", "Awkward Kisser", and "I Saw Lightning", among others have been stuck in my head for various amounts of time over the last week. That was helped by my usual listening to the entire discography of the band before the show, along with a Tiny Desk set webcast on NPR (apparently Michael is a huge fan of Bob Boilen, and it'll be posted here at some point). During that, they played a bit of the old ELO song, Can't Get It out of My Head, which luckily I can't get into my head. My favorite thing about the picture? The Beatles Anthology book bookended with the Beatles bobbleheads. I want those.

The show was part of a co-headlining tour. An Horse opened at the Black Cat, when Telekinesis! has opened for them the night before in Philly. I'd never heard of An Horse, although they had apparently opened for Death Cab for Cutie in Australia and for Tegan & Sara in the US. There were many people there just for them, as the crowd noticeably thinned after they played. I didn't love them, but they were enjoyable enough, even with the thin sound only a guitar and drums can make, and certainly got me in the mood for Telekinesis!'s set. There were also many underage people there. I guess both bands were kinda emo-y, but I felt very old fogey-y. During An Horse's set, all of the members of Telekinesis! were within a few feet of me at various times. I did not know what the other, non-Lerner, members looked like, but I was too shy to tell him how great his album was. But I was literally standing right next to the other members and I didn't know.

With only one album at only 31 minutes long, and with only a couple EPs and a single out (most of the tracks on those were rerecorded for the album), they certainly couldn't play for very long. So I wasn't expecting all that much when they came out around 10:40. They played for around 40 minutes, missing "Awkward Kisser", but whipping out a pretty good Kinks cover in "A House in the Country" to replace it, and doing every other song from the album (I think). Yes, Telekinesis!'s touring band features an Asian female bassist (who was tatted up). Michael Lerner looked quite a bit like a muppet (Animal in particular), once he took his glasses off and was flailing around but still kinda in one place. The two guitarists, hipster/pedophile/70s Swedish softcore porn actor and Jared Leto were pretty good. The in-between-song banter was slightly repetitive (they said they were very excited about being in DC a few times), but it seemed like it was due to being charged up rather than anything else.

After Michael got out from in front of the drums (to play his small guitar for Rust, he saw there was also a slight problem with the stuffed raccoon on top of Michael's drum kit, as an anti-fur person put an anti-fur sticker on it. And then had a shouted disagreement with Lerner (a vegetarian) over whether it was a real raccoon or not. Seriously? It's, very obviously, a stuffed raccoon. What the hell? I may agree with you guys that fur is evil, but I think you're just a huge bunch of douchebags. You and PETA.