Out Hud Need New Body

For a long time, the indie rock audience wasn’t all that different from the Puritans. Strict, conservative dress code, smug self-righteousness, and definitely no dancing. But in the past year, dance punk groups such as !!! and the Rapture have convinced kids to uncross their arms and move—or at least twitch a little. And that’s to say nothing about IDM (intelligent dance music): a thinking man’s genre that is to techno what emo is to metal, a scrubbed-clean version of a more popular, more hedonistic—the two being directly proportional—genre.

Out Hud, who share three members with !!!, would more easily fall into the latter category if they could get over their love-affair with mid-‘90s Morcheeba. Consisting of keyboards, cello, bass and classic drum machines, the group stuck mostly to straight forward, down tempo material in their live set. Things remained subdued, and the audience quietly bobbed along to a primarily instrumental set. The crowd and the band broke loose only at the last possible moment, when drum programmer Tyler Pope launched into a brief dance set. Suddenly, you knew people weren’t just paying attention, but were seriously caught up in Out Hud’s trip hop blowback.

Beans didn’t fare so well. After the breakup of the Anti-Pop Consortium, this emcee has set out on his own but has not added anything to make up for the loss of his old cohorts. The result was a static set showcasing Beans’ flawless flow but offering almost nothing in the way of a watchable performance. I’m sure rapping over prerecorded tracks must cut down on the budget costs, but bringing a deejay along for the ride might have made him seem a tad less aloof.

The highlight of the show came early with Need New Body, the only artists backed up by live drums and percussion. Though only a few dozen people had yet arrived, this sextet of multi-instrumentalists lurched their way through a bizarre array of mismatched genres and somehow snared the most positive audience response of the night. Falling closer to the dance punk side of the current music scene, they draw from a wider background than groups like the Rapture. It was as if the band had stopped in every bar on the strip, picked up snatches of bluegrass, jazz, rock and dance, then tried to reassemble everything they heard using banjo, organ, and a bicycle wheel. Their earnest, deadpan performance held up their skewed songs even when the only clear sounds were snatches of Sunday brunch jazz under a Mickey Mouse falsetto.

The enthusiasm Need New Body generated suggests perhaps the biggest roadblock to IDM’s rise to power. In a subculture that centers around small venues with weak sound systems, no drum machine can replace the physical force of a live bass drum, carrying the audience along with even the most outlandish of rhythms.