Brian Slattery Photo
Jamie Van Dyck.
The stage at Toad’s Place was dark. There was a burst of music, and a projection screen blazed up amid the smoke as the members of Earthside took their places. From the very first note the band played, the music was sweeping, cinematic, and emotionally raw.
But just about all the way through its set, the band was smiling.
Ryan Griffin.
Following the go-big-or-go-home mentality that fueled Earthside’s epic self-released debut, A Dream in Static, and propelled the band to its first U.S. tour (last fall) and first European tour (coming up this spring), the New Haven-based band’s official record release at Toad’s on Thursday night was a spectacle as tight as it was huge. The band was in fine form, never missing a beat, and the visuals throughout only added to the show, helping ever more of the audience members find their place in Earthside’s grand vision of a musical experience.
The projections also ingeniously solved a problem that A Dream in Static created. On the album, Earthside is an instrumental band with a rotating cast of guest vocalists. To perform the songs live, Earthside projected the vocalists singing the songs, while the band played along. This concept, which might sound a little too much like karaoke in theory, worked really well in practice — in no small part because the band’s commitment to the music was no less than it would have been with the vocalists in the room.
Frank Sacramone.
Live, Earthside also managed to convey something that doesn’t come across on the album: that the music, in addition to being grand and ambitious, is also a lot of fun. From song to song, riff to riff, change to change, guitarist Jamie Van Dyck, bassist Ryan Griffin, and keyboardist Frank Sacramone couldn’t stop smiling for long. Even drummer Ben Shanbrom let a little crinkle into his lip as he concentrated on holding down the music’s complicated rhythms. The banter in between the songs, mostly from Van Dyck, was wonderfully unserious. (“This next song is called ‘The Ungrounding,’ Wish us luck!”) The band’s obvious joy in playing their music live elevated it from cathartic to celebratory.
After Earthside closed its set — and right before Van Dyck moved to stage right for an endless chain of hugs and congratulations from audience members — he enjoined fans to stick around for the New Haven-based post-rock outfit Wess Meets West.
“Their music is very beautiful,” Van Dyck said. And it was. So was Earthside’s.
Head with Wings, also from New Haven, had the slot before Earthside, and showed that they have only grown as a band, digging deeper into the songs they’ve written and making them tighter and stronger. Joshua Corum’s vocals were particularly good; they soared above the music even at its biggest, and filled Toad’s to the rafters.
