Isn’t it nice when things live up to expectations? It just makes you feel all tingly inside. Or in the case of Deerhunter’s performance last night, completely and utterly awestruck. Bradford Cox and company set the bar high for this year’s Noise Pop Festival by completely destroying the sound barrier at the Mezzanine. Seriously, my ears are still ringing.

Even though they play so nonchalantly, effortlessly sending gigantic sonic landscapes into the crowd, they still somehow command your dancing feet by bringing out melody at just the right time. If someone were to tell me that a vortex of flying bodies (I can’t bring myself to say mosh pit) was going to occur, I would have laughed. But it did, and I joined in.

Overall, it was nice to transcend the cleanliness of the Microcastle recording. Fans of Cryptograms and Cox’s Atlas Sound days would have eaten it up. I guess I can see how you might be a little confused by their willingness to play an encore that consists of rubbing the microphone into a guitar pickup, but I still think we got the perfect balance between all out chaos and sing-a-long. After all, it’s Deerhunter — know what you’re getting into.

Anyways, like a good little blogger I snapped some pictures, but I will admit that most of them turned out crappy due to my poor skillz. But that’s what happens when you give your one press pass to the writer instead of the photographer.

Click on photos to enlarge

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