Monday, July 23, 2012

Live Review - Beach House @ Rumsey Playfield, Central Park

Any artist performing in the outdoors during the summer is not the center of attention, the weather is. For Baltimore's Beach House, the ambient / dream-pop band who on Monday night, sold-out Rumsey Playfield inside New York's Central Park, their glowing set was marred only by the center of attention - Mother Nature. As fans flocked to Central Park in the disgusting New York City humidity,  staying dry was not going to be an option, instead, it would only add to the bands textured and atmospheric music.

Arriving on stage at 8p.m. sharp, Beach House took everyone's attention off the weather and turned it right onto their colorful light show and as the sun was setting, and the lights getting brighter, the ambiance around the audience was something to celebrate. It was perfect summer music, being played in a great venue, yet, a half hour into their set, lightning would cut across the sky and the rain began. At first, it was refreshing and cooled off the crowd who were packing in closer and closer to the stage, and made for a romantic evening for the couples huddling under their umbrellas, but as the night progressed, it would just keep coming down in droves. Singer Victoria Legrand told the crowd, "We are not going to let the storm win. Pardon my French, but - Fuck the rain!" With that declaration, the bands colorful light show and playing a majority of songs off their latest record Bloom and throwing in favorites from Teen Dream and a few from their previous material - Devotion and their self-titled debut, Beach House had the audience hooked.

By 9p.m., Beach House kept thanking the crowd for enduring the weather and closed their main set. After a brief wait in the wings, they came back for their encore and while some began leaving, die hard fans and fans who realized they were already soaked to the bone, stuck around for the final moments of summer night that could have been so much worse, but was something to experience.