Review: Dawes Fans Can Dance

The aforementioned tune When My Time Comes contains a great lyric that goes, “And now the only piece of advice that continues to help; anyone that’s making anything new only breaks something else,” which goes a long way in describing the band’s sound. Over the course of a show, you’ll hear Warren Zevon, the Band, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, Bon Jovi, Billy Joel’s Keeping the Faith, and even some Workingman’s Dead-ish cosmic country jams. Hence, Dawes really hasn’t broken new sonic ground per se, but rather they’ve collected a menagerie of high quality influences and successfully baked them together.

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The Bowery show proved that a Dawes performance does not revolve around hit songs, as the band sounded just as good to the crowd on three unfamiliar new numbers and their lower ballads as they did on the more popular tunes like Peace in the Valley and My Girl to Me. The band rifled through a slew of quick hitting material in the first half of the show while settling in for some longer workouts in latter half, easily maintaining both the energy and the crowd’s attention throughout.

To close it down, Dawes served up a special “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” encore, when they rattled off a barrelhouse rendition of Warren Zevon’s Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Of all the artists that people hear in Dawes’ music, Zevon comes across as one of the strongest, so catering to that sound-alike made for a climactic close to a milestone show.

Taylor Goldsmith said it plain and simple, “This is the most fun I think we’ve ever had at a show.” He’s a charmer, so perhaps he was just flirting with the crowd, but hey, it worked. Every now and then, hype comes well-deserved and on Friday night at the Bowery Ballroom, Dawes earned their stripes. After all, they even got the indie kids to dance.

• Previously on HT: Blips (way ahead of Rolling Stone and Spin of course) and The B-List: Top Six of the Last Six