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Animal collective
BunnyBrains out-freak the folkies, plus Broken Social Scene
BY CAMILLE DODERO
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Devendra Banhart’s audience was warned. A week ago Wednesday, percussionist/singer Gregory Rogove from openers Tarantula A.D. tried to prepare the Somerville Theatre audience for about what was to follow. "BunnyBrains is up next," he told us. "Be afraid." Even though Boston should’ve known better — BunnyBrains have been kicking around here for a decade, with a five-disc box set issued just last year on Narnack — it was sorta like alerting a coastal city about an impending tidal wave. When 15 freaks materialized on stage, in the aisles, and at the back of the theater in half-assed character masks (a white-bearded lawn troll, a fuzzy unicorn hood, a wolf-snouted bass-player), it was as if Hanna Barbera had unloaded the company dumpster into the hall. Stringy-haired BunnyBrains mystic Daniel Bunny moaned nonsensical mantras like "Wade in the water" and "Take your shackles back!" while a cacophony of horns puked, a red-dressed woman yammered into a pair of microphones, another woman choked into a CB radio, and a shirtless guy shone a near-blinding spotlight onto the crowd. Screw Don McLean: this was the day the music died. With characters on and off the stage in full freakout, it was difficult to tell who was in the band and who wasn’t — even more so when members of the local folk/performance art collective Dreamhouse dragged an enormous sky-blue tarp down the stage-left aisle like a Chinese New Year dragon, then covered the unsuspecting middle-orchestra section with the canvas. Cue people gettng furious, holding the tarp over their heads, trying to push it off. A theater manager appeared, ordered the sound cut, and loudly, hysterically declared the tarp a fire hazard. Plunge into Death’s Mark E. Moon later reported that Banhart’s father and friends "were really pissed off." A Northeastern sophomore laughed, "I have no idea how I’m going to explain this to my friends. Like a circus without any cages?" Exhausted by a late night in Montreal, Broken Social Scene leader/frontman Kevin Drew was curled up in his tour bus Saturday night outside Avalon, spending the hours before their tour kickoff watching The Secret Lives of Dentists on a flat-screen television and not saying much. But Brendan Canning, his professorial BSS foil, was considerably more talkative at Boston Beer Works, digging into an El Paso salad, busting into air guitar when "You Shook Me" came on, and recalling a solitary incident in which he’d played bass in a Ramones cover band. ("I got to be the ‘1-2-3’ guy. What’s his name? Dee Dee?") A handful of his fellow Scenesters dropped by for a quick bite and left. The subject of guest lists came up. "Someday we’re going to have to write the plus-one love song," Canning offered. "‘You’re my plus-one.’ Or it could be a lost-love song, ‘You used to be my plus-one.’ Wouldn’t that be great?" Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com
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