Image via Josh

You know…seeing Icy Demons and Yeasayer the night after of Montreal, and watching all of it heavily dosed on cold medicine, is an awful lot of sound to pack into two days.

Icy Demons is the most inappropriately-named band I’ve seen in ages. They’re almost ridiculously warm and friendly, with the panda bears on their pants and the smiling and their adorable macramé covered rattle. But Donte wasn’t kidding when he wondered if the audience would be able to keep up with the band’s dizzying genre changes–I certainly couldn’t. It felt like this band was everyone’s side project and so everyone got to write a song or two and the band had to play it, no matter how it fit with the rest of them. One song we’re rocking an excellent synth-rock jam and the next we’re verging on reggae, and then all of a sudden it sounds like a lounge band on a cruise ship has taken over. Josh said, “Icy Demons were like the old saying “If you don’t like the weather now, stick around. It will change,” and they’re one of the few bands that can put a crazy collection of genres in their myspace subheadline and really mean it. They currently have “ICY DEMONS: EXPERIMENTAL / CLUB / DUB”, which hardly covers their range.”

I enjoy genre-hopping as much as the next girl, and what I liked of Icy Demons I really liked. They’re like world music from the future, a house band in a sci-fi movie, and by the time they were done I was thoroughly bewildered.

What I’ve heard of Yeasayer on the radio has been likeable, and I was happy to see that they had brought their own very flattering lighting and an incredibly busted cymbal with them. I see what they’re going for, and how a lot of people like it, but live Yeasayer is one of those bands like Grizzly Bear and The Walkmen where I am just not in on the secret that the rest of the crowd is in on. Chris Keating’s facial and body contortions are certainly entertaining, and when I was paying less attention to them and more attention to the girls next to me who were in love with the bass player, I found them pleasant enough. Focusing, I found their earnestness and futuristic late-70′s revival apocalypse sound kind of grating. Sometimes a song –like, naturally, ’2080′– or a few moments of a song and I would click and I would almost get it, but then it was gone.

Josh spent most of the set taking pictures, but says, “Once I started watching and paying attention it became more obvious that they were carving out a spot in the multi-part dude harmony pantheon/resurgence. Fleet Foxes have nature spirituals, Grizzly Bear have mushroom trips, Grand Archives might have summer road trips, and Yeasayer are like the last days of the dirty seventies when everyone used coke unironically and took pan-flute assisted spiritual awakening journeys. I think of them living happily in the house with the gunfight in Boogie Nights.”

But the part of the crowd who knew the secret password –the vast majority of it– seemed super happy and so staunchly committed to getting an encore that it was a struggle to get out all the way to the back of the show room. The room was packed and sweaty and happy, and perhaps on another night without a raging head cold I could have learned the handshake myself, but last night I was content to leave the encore for the fans.