Vote Yea on Yeasayer

As far as we can tell, Icy Demons are neither icy nor demons. Instead, they are fronted by a guy playing upright bass and wearing panda pants who could easily be Wesley Willis' nephew. The Demons kinda remind us of The Unicorns, in that every song seems to contain bits and pieces of multiple songs from multiple genres, both hits and misses. For the final song of the Chicago band's all-over-the-place opening set, the aforementioned potentially crazy guy jumped into the Neumo's audience and got all up in our dear Donte's grill, the result of which is the photo on the left. According to Donte, he is indicating, "I want YOU to rock out to our fun, loud, weird music!" but we're pretty sure he was getting ready to attack, schizophrenic hobo-style.

On the right then is Chris Keating of Yeasayer. All the members of the Brooklyn quartet provide vocals ranging from multi-part harmonies to a four-man falsetto, but it's Keating who delivers the big flourishes and the angry infant arms. The band's sound approximates '70s-leaning world music gospel, which you'd think would be horrendous, but somehow it works, especially on their best song, retro-futuristic call to arms "2080." We give credit to the utter unironicness of what they're doing, even when it's a more bombastic version of "Red Cave" or a take on "Sunrise" that's verging into space-prog territory. On the other hand, there's Yeasayer's bassist, who we refer to as "Weird Al." We'd like to have a drink with him--or the real Weird Al for that matter. Now that's dedication to Movember.

Polaroids care of iamdonte.
For some more great photos of last night's show, be sure to check out the Flickr photoset from Metblogs' Josh.