Ice Cream Man

At Bonnaroo last summer I found myself wandering over to a tent where Damien Rice (ed. check out awesome DR show here) was playing. I liked his music but couldn’t really imagine how it would translate to the high-energy, jam-band atmosphere. Rice put my fears to rest and managed to rock his melancholy ballads into raucous crowd-pleasers. I felt similarly about Lost At Sea’s Jan. 4 live show. Having heard their recent EP, I never would have expected them to put on such a loud show. I tend to go in for the kind of thoughtful, emotionally unbarred, ethereal stuff that Lost At Sea does so well reminiscent of favorites like Andrew Bird and Rufus Wainwright, but building genuinely new sound on these foundations so I was skeptical of how it would translate to the amped-up, dingy underworld of Lit. Of course the drums were too loud and the vocals occasionally lost, but the eerie keyboard and front man Asher Leed’s vocal outpourings added a force that elevated rather than overpowered the songs’ intentions. I’m still looking forward to some upcoming acoustic shows and, hopefully, the reintroduction of a violin (a key element in the record’s not-just-like-everyone-else sound), but this one hit the spot for a Wednesday night.