On this really gorgeous evening with mild temperatures, low humidity mostly clear skies and a full moon, we got to Pier 54 for the last Hudson River Park's RiverRocks show around 7 p.m. as Dom, the Worcester-based band with their second EP, Family of Love (Astralwerks), just out, started a set filled with catchy songs and the pouting, sweet, insistent scent of the joints being puffed around us. (We may have accidentally found ourselves hanging out with the wrong crowd for a change.)
PopMatters said of the new album,
Indie burnouts Dom probably subscribe to the adage that good things come in small packages: The mysterious but buzzed-about Worcester, MA band must believe in a short-and-sweet aesthetic, going at its own pace and releasing two EPs to its name in the past two years. Even briefer than the debut Sun Bronzed Greek Gods by a few tracks, Dom’s latest nugget, Family of Love, is a more focused effort that still has a tossed-off, casual feel. A good example of how Dom takes well-worn elements and intuitively recombines them into something novel, opener “Telephone” is a canny mix of anachronistic oldies thematics, ‘80s new-wavey elements, and ‘90s indie attitude. Better yet is the bouncy lo-fi of “Some Boys”, which comes off lazy but hot-and-bothered at the same time, thanks to the bratty guest vocals credited to a friend of the band named Emma. Ending on that note, the all-too-short EP leaves you wanting for more, though, then again, there’s no room for filler here, either.
It was pretty crowded and our view wasn't great, but the band sounded terrific.
(Video courtesy of (((unartig))), who has amazing stuff at the (((unartig))) website.)
This is from Pitchfork's review of the new EP:
Family of Love's brevity-- five songs in just under 17 minutes-- doesn't exactly encourage high expectations out of the gate. The real (and very welcome) shock, then, is how well-honed those five songs sound. This stuff is packed with detail, both silly (the telephone keypad solo on "Telephone") and ambitious ("Damn"'s sea of golden guitar lines). A few songs bleed into each other, like parts of a larger whole; the album's most straightforward synth-pop cut, "Happy Birthday Party", dissolves into rumpled noise and fluttering flutes towards its close. These are rich, dense-sounding compositions.
We think Dom, the person and frontman for the band, is pretty funny and multi-talented and we hope he can eventually pay everyone the money he owes them.
There was a lot of beer and weed around. We don't partake of either, being so abstemious as well as old, but we may have done what our grandfather used to do when he was in his sixties when we both worked at his son's clothing store on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn and maybe gotten a little bit of a contact high from the joints being puffed around us.
Our companion -- this is one of those times there's more than the editorial "we" in this post -- wanted to go to dinner, so we left after Dom's really fine set and never did get to see Deer Tick. No, we won't give in to the urge to put a frownie emoticon here.
We will say that we're grateful we got to hear Dom tonight before we were dragged off just after 8 p.m.
As Pitchfork concluded in its Family of Love review, "Living forever is a desire often explored in pop music; I'm not sure that the boys in Dom want to exist for eternity-- if they keep behaving the way that they allegedly do, they won't even come close-- but they're clearly set on making the most of their time while they're here."
We had a pleasant dinner in Chelsea, but this is some of what we missed of Deer Tick (again thanks to (((unartig))), for whom we are also grateful:
