Photos: Diehard and DD/MM/YYYY at Union Hall

DD/MM/YYYY (pronounced “date month year”) was pretty much exactly what I was expecting.  Spastic, exciting, not-quite-noise rock.  It will never really be my thing, but these guys were well-practiced.  I know that sounds like a silly thing to say, that they were tight musicians.  But sometimes, with this new trend to noisily push the bounds of accessible indie rock, bands are often sloppy and don’t sound great live.  DD/MM/YYYY were totally together.  The most exciting moments in their constantly changing performance (guitar, drums, and key players rotated on a per-song basis) were the sudden percussion breakdowns.  They’d be leading you down one path and wham!  Out of nowhere they’d come to a perfectly-timed halt to bang out quarter notes on whatever they could find to bang on.  Executed with precision, the whole show went off quite well.

Adorable openers, Diehard, played their first show ever to a full-ish Union Hall.  My biggest criticism of the new band was that they shouldn’t be so hard on themselves!  They kept apologizing about all their mistakes, which was, in the end, fairly endearing.  But the standard indie-rock quartet actually had some pretty good songs, and shouldn’t have been so hard on themselves.  I’d like to see them again in the future, where I hope they will play their catchy, upbeat tunes with more confidence.

Diehard:

DD/MM/YYYY: