REVIEW: Peach Pit Sets the Midnight Oil Ablaze with a Late-Night Shaky Knees Set to Remember
WRITTEN BY EITAN OHANA
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Photo by @mts2.photo
“An intimate set.” Sometimes, we hear that and reflexively grow repulsed, the body’s instinctual response to an idea loaded with 2010’s era PNW aesthetic. But other times, it’s the only descriptor mighty enough to describe a performance that sticks in your craw for a week, two weeks, a lifetime. In the dark of a midnight that signaled the first seconds of Saturday, September 19, Peach Pit rocked the 625-person capacity Terminal West in what I could only call an intimate set.
Mixed between crowd members who showed up for this performance specifically or had shuffled their way over to the venue after a jam-packed first day of Shaky Knees Festival - and trust me, jam-packed is a kind way to describe going from Geese into Turnstile into Fontaines D.C. into The Strokes with no buffer between.
90 minutes, 19 songs, breakneck pace. That’s what the Canadian indie pop band gave those fans.
When I walked into the venue, admittedly a few minutes after the start due to a tight turnaround (refer to the aforementioned Shaky Knees spring), the crowd was already at full-go, shouting along to “Figure 8,” a track off their 2020 album You and Your Friends. I could tell something was in the air.
“Black Licorice,” off the same album, was next. That’s one of my personal favorites from them, and drew me right into the crowd’s energy
That’s part of the magic of live performances though, isn’t it? All it takes is one song that means something to you, takes you back to a time in your life, or that you just plain like, and the portal into momentary blissness - thank you Fontaines D.C. - swallows you in.
Approaching the midway point, the band played a crowdpleasing mashup of Her’s’ “What Once Was” and their own “Techno Show,” which was the start of lead guitarist Christopher Vanderkooy ascending into musical orbit. In all my years of going to concerts and engaging with live music, I’m not sure I can say I’ve seen a more inspired performance than the one put on by Vanderkooy when a song called him up from the bullpen. His flourishes on “Alrighty Aphrodite” and “Private Presley” felt like the moment in an original coming of age movie where the main character is finally on stage after an hour of trials and tribulations, the spotlight glowing brightly on them.
Anyway, this is perhaps representative of what’s unique about Peach Pit: they lean into grand solos and cinematic spurts of music more than most, and the stage serves as a conduit to elevated grandeur. There’s a shared frontman dynamic between Vanderkooy and lead singer Neil Smith that feels devoid of harmful ego and is representative of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
With all that said, there’s a moment near the end of the show that stuck with me. Personality fluctuates from band to band and showcases what type of presence a group wants to have. Doing the typical “we’ve got x number of songs left,” Smith counts to five, and then mentions the encore that’ll be added on top of that. He then told the crowd that the encore length will be determined by the number of songs we request. Was that true? I’m not sure. Well, literally, it wasn’t, because once it came time for the encore the crowd erupted in chants of “10 more songs, 10 more songs!,” and, well, they didn’t play 10 more songs.
But it’s not about the number of songs they ended up playing. It’s about creating that temporary, exciting moment between artist and crowd, a form of art in and of itself. To me, the best live performers have always been the ones that respond to an audience’s energy and ride the wave with them. I can only speak to this one night, but on it, Peach Pit set off a tsunami.