Passion Pit - Terminal 5 - January 8-9, 2010
Backed by gigantic LED screens, Passion Pit took the stage to entrance music pounding through the speakers, an evolutionary gesture. The crowd—a mix of hardened hipsters with battle stories and tweens with tickets bought on parental credit cards—lost its collective mind in that cocktail of excitement and uncertain celebrity usually associated with midlevel professional athletes and reality-TV stars. In this pose, the Boston kids in Passion Pit proved to be as magnanimous as they were confident, saying something unspoken like: “Dear 3,000 people, thanks for buying tickets to see us. Appreciate it. Now we’re going to light this place up, OK?”
For a band little more than 18 months removed from a now-famed residency at Pianos, filling the joint at Terminal 5 on a Friday night must have been surreal. As if paying homage to its humble beginnings, Passion Pit opened with “I’ve Got Your Number,” the lead-track from the EP Chunk of Change. The crowd appeared clued in on the band’s catalog, words memorized and movement ready. And the band proceeded to make good on that unspoken promise, playing “Make Light” as the room turned into a cascading series of flashing white LEDs.
The show lagged slightly in the middle but found its legs in the homestretch. Passion Pit closed the main set with “Little Secrets,” turning the crowd into little bubbles of boiling water, popping up to the surface as if driven by some elemental. The band then returned with “Eyes Like Candles” and an explosive cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams”—the night’s most unexpectedly pleasant moment—before closing with “Sleepyhead.” The floor turned into an undulating mass of clapping, stomping and jumping, and Michael Angelakos stormed around the front of the stage, much unlike those days at Pianos. —Geoff Nelson
Photos courtesy of Sean O’Kane | seanokanephoto.com
