Twin Shadow Plays Webster Hall, Ends Tour, Wipes Memory

I blacked out most of this show. Not because of booze or smoking cocaine or marijuana cigarettes or cough syrup or butt-chugging or Soviet brainwashing techniques. I don’t need those things to have fun at a concert, and my mind is in need of zero sponge baths, thank you very much, Soviets. I blacked out because I yanked out the wireless antenna that connects our heads to the servers of social media. And it hurt. At first. But then it made things fun.

This won’t be a diatribe about how we’re too tethered to our devices and our social networks. All I’m saying is that, when I go do a thing that is fun, I often get caught up in documenting it in real-time, but forget to enjoy it in real-time. I live-tweet, I Instagram, I take notes on my phone if I think I might be writing about it. This time I said to myself, “Hey. Don’t.” And once I said that to myself, myself immediately understood what I meant.

So yeah, I blacked out a lot of it because I decided to enjoy myself. And it was fun as HECK.

Here’s what I remember after self-inducing hypnosis and interpreting the finger paintings that my subconscious made me do all over the floor of my apartment with bleu cheese dressing.

Niki and the Dove opened. They are the most Swedish. The guy standing behind me clearly wanted everybody to know that he was their biggest fan in the audience, which he proved by yelling all the words in monotone directly into my ear. I’m going to just go ahead and bury that memory again. Both Niki and Dove (Dove?) at one point were both playing a tiny drum on a stick with little balls tethered to it that they rolled back and forth in their hands to make the balls hit the drum. It’s a thing you probably played in an elementary school orchestra alongside a recorder and the glockenspiel. There’s probably a name for it, but it’s probably buried deeper in my subconscious with my date and algebra.

Then, Twin Shadow. Twin Damn Shadow. George Freaking Lewis Jr. That young man is a talent. He walked onto the stage and held up a bottle of champagne and then there were sounds everywhere. There were lights and screens with strange plaid images and fog rolling out from his feet, and the fog crept towards me and clouded my memory. So clouded.

He told us to take off our shirts and swing them around our heads when a song began. And we did. An attractive girl sidled up next to me and started dancing all up on me, and I was like, "Hey." But then I realized that she was on all of the drugs and was just looking for a human stripper pole so I was like, "Aw man." He popped the bottle of champagne before his encore, a slowed-down version of “The One” that was reminiscent of Marty McFly playing “Earth Angel” with Marvin Berry and the Starlighters at the end of Back to the Future. It all happened so fast, and then it was over and I became sad. My friend Christina and I hopped a cab back downtown and the cab driver put on a Kevin Federline Fedora—or “K-Fedo” as I like to call them—and blasted “Come Sail Away” by Styx and we rocked out all the way back. That I remember vividly.

Enjoy these pictures that I digitally recreated from my memories and the bleu cheese finger paintings—I’m going to go self-induce hypnosis again. Man, that was fun.

@theringadingkid