Thursday Night in Hell's Kitchen: Hudson River Park's RiverRocks presents Temples with Here We Go Magic and Spires at Pier 84

(Videos courtesy Michael Mehalick)

Thursday Evening in Hell's Kitchen: Hudson River Park RiverRocks presents Teenage Fanclub with Honeyblood and Saint Rich at Pier 84

(Videos courtesy unARTigNYC) (Videos courtesy Visible Spit) (Video courtesy unARTigNYC) (Video courtesy gscftm01) (Video courtesy Michael Mehalick)

Thursday Night in Hell's Kitchen: RiverRocks presents Wild Beasts and Mutual Benefit at Hudson River Park's Pier 84

(Video courtesy qbertplaya) (Video courtesy cuanan cronwright)

Thursday Night at Hudson River Park: RiverRocks presents Titus Andronicus at Pier 84

(Video courtesy Adventures in Music)

(Video courtesy skizz0rz)

Thursday Night in Hell's Kitchen: Foxygen with Thao & The Get Down, Stay Down and The Aves at Hudson River Park Pier 84

(Video courtesy Flygrade)

(Video courtesy Skizz0rz)

(Video courtesy Flygrade)

(Video courtesy Tear-n Tan)

(Video courtesy Skizz0rz)

(Video courtesy Shutterhound)

Thursday Night in the Meatpacking District: Hudson River Park's RiverRocks presents Deer Tick and Dom

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:

Thursday Evening in the Meatpacking District: Dinosaur Feathers opens for The Antlers at Pier 54 (and is so good they blow the generator)

We were really tired this evening and need to get up at like 4 a.m. tomorrow, but we like Dinosaur Feathers a lot

(a friend introduced us to "Vendela Vida" - their song, not the writer) and we figured we'd go see them open for The Antlers at Pier 54 and call it an early night. Their music was so powerful that they blew the generator in the middle of a song maybe twenty minutes into what had been an incredibly good set at 7:47 p.m.

About twenty minutes later, someone managed to get the public announcement system going so the guy from Hudson River Park's RiverRocks series could tell us what was going on: A new generator was ordered once the old one was deemed unfixable, and it would take a while to get there. So people hung out, some plopping down,

others standing up, just enjoying the company of others, drinks, food, the sunset

and the cool breezes of the pier.

About fifteen minutes after that, Dinosaur Feathers gamely and gallantly used the jerry-rigged P.A. system to come back on and do what they could under difficult circumstances. Like on Apollo 13, nobody was sure if it would work at all.

It did! They still sounded amazing. Actually, and this will reveal once again our total ineptitude in judging sounds (we were always told we were tone-deaf), the weird makeshift sound system seemed to give an added richness to the usual radiance of Greg Sullo's voice on "Family Waves."

(Illustration by Meredith Leich at The New York Rockmarket blog)

We really have to hand it to Greg, Duck Zimmerman and Ryan Michael Kiley for being utterly professional.

They're first-rate musical artists and deserved better, but they rose to the occasion and performed "Fantasy Memorial" really well without drums and monitors and everything. For us, they didn't lose anything beautiful on it. Well, maybe a little but we're glad they were going to end with it. But then they were told to keep going for one more song, and they did a new one. Wowwee wowwee. A truck with flashing lights with the generator drove up on the side during it, and after Dinosaur Feathers got some well-deserved love,

people waited for The Antlers. If you want to see truly breathtaking pics of the bands, Amanda M Hatfield has her usual spectacular ones over at The Music Slut. This is what a brilliant professional can do in capturing a band during an unexpected interruption:

Or check out the always-terrific concert photos of Tear-n Tan at their blog.

Anyway, we were tired and happy and still older than most other two people here combined, so as much as we wanted to see The Antlers, our body was shutting down and we were too tired to get rid of the chartreuse line at the bottom of our pathetic cell phone pic.

So we walked across 14th Street, passing joyful dancing and music at Sunset Salsa at the triangle at Ninth Avenue

to the L train back home to Lorimer Street, our blood pressure medicine, and bed.