DUCKTAILS
The Lexington | February 25th
On this year’s Domino-released The Flower Lane LP, Real Estate man Matt Mondanile’s Ducktails swapped the swirling hypnagogic stew of previous records like Landscapes and III: Arcade Dynamics for something more streamlined, something sleeker, something cleaner and cleaner.
With this in mind, it was an exceptionally pleasant surprise to find that the Ducktails live set was a winning combination of what made their older material so charming – the languid, langorous, woozy guitar runs, the spaced-out, hazy, dislocated ambience, the looseness of it all – and makes the new album such a good listen – the tightness of it, the plasticity of its interlocking parts, the gorgeous hooks.
After the solo-guitar-and-voice of Spectrals’ opening set, the fullness of Ducktails’ sound is a delight; Thick chords slide seamlessly into extended duelling solos between Mondanile – indie-rock’s most unassuming-yet-legitimate heartthrob since Stephen Malkmus – and his co-guitarist, the pair coming on like The Feelies suddenly deciding to, for a night at least, become a wigged-out psych group, with Ian Drennan’s synth-trills providing a perfectly saccharine counterweight to the freewheeling fretwork on display.
For a band whose most recent record lyrically espouses the joy of meeting someone, of travelling to be somewhere with someone, they have a wonderfully meandering approach to performing live – tracks like Assistant Director are extended into Chic-style elegant moonlit disco, their cover of Peter Gutteridge’s Planet Phrom morphs into a mirrorball-on-prom-night-friendly slowdance soundtrack, Ivy Covered House twists itself into the kind of song you hope never ends. There’s a sense of classicism about the band, a continuation of that buttoned-up, dB’s-eqsue jangly, power-pop lineage, a refutation of the idea that everything has to be new, but they do it with such panache, and clearly have so much fun up there on stage – Mondanile in particular is weirdly impossible to look away from – that the audience are swept along, waiting for the next fret-foray, the next synth-motif, the next five minutes of laid-back bliss.
There’s an honesty to Ducktails, a lack of pretence, resulting in the kind of gig that makes you remember why nights spent in dark, dank, beer-drenched rooms are sometimes really worth it.
Words: Josh Baines
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