So apparently it’s prom season.
In comes all the taffeta, floor length mockery. The after-midnight debauchery of the young, restless and willing. Everything is a little tacky. Everything is a little unrefined under a layer of thickly caked on make-up. Bad decisions are made, and long nights flung around the rim of a toilet bowl await.
I’m so happy I’m not in high school anymore.
But, as fate would have it, Denver-based indie-band Tennis not only played a sold-out show at Great Scott in Allston earlier this week (May 17, to be exact), but had me almost nostalgic for all that glitter, gold, and all of those $9.99 handles of Popovs from my bitter-sweet prom-ridden past.
The back of the small stage lit up in silver streamers and bright lights. While the outlines of stagnant instruments rested aloof and in the image of Napoleon Dynamite’s own prom night. It all seemed appropriate. Something almost eery hung over the audience in anticipation, as the string, globe lights shadowed the set in a solemn hymn to a scene long deserted.
Then Alaina Moore and her bandmate/oh-so-adorable husband Patrick Riley treaded to their appropriate places with the rest of the band in tow. Life enveloped the immediate and an anxious crowd beseeched their dream-like heroes. Moore, painted in black from head to toe, curated the anti-prom prom show. She relayed the dichotomy of light to dark; like the daguerreotypist transfusing some otherworldly iconography.
But, the music implored the night’s music goers with whimsical renditions of Tennis’s old and new hits. Riley etched away at his guitar strings while staring, necessarily smitten at his wife. Moore the badass, pint-sized heart-throb that she is, sang sumptuous verses into the microphone while patting away at her keyboards: alternating with the palatable hum of her maracas.
Love, pardon my cliché, was in the air.
For once, a band played in the light, rather than tainted by the diffusion of darkness. And in that, hope rested in the hands of Tennis and their fans. An existential cool washed over the evening’s events. Contrary to the words of one of Tennis’s bigger hits, this my friends, just didn’t feel all the same.
Follow Madi Silvers on Twitter @MadiSilvers.