Ima Robot frontman Alex Ebert started after escaping rehab, naming his new band after a messianic character he’d created for an as-yet unreleased novel.
Perhaps the spiritual provenance of the band name helps to explain the vaguely hippie-church feeling one gets from the band’s exuberant, folk-tinged sound. Every jubilant Edward Sharpe song comes across with the same energy and tongue-in-cheek kitsch as a ’70s summer camp sing-along, with tambourines, plenty of percussion and sunny-sweet vocals.
Wednesday nightap show at opened with Paper Bird, a match that turned out to be even more apropos than I originally expected. Paper Bird has toned down the ragtime-y, retro style they originally threw into the Denver music mix, coming off much more as a modern band with a vintage touch than a retro gimmick. They’ve wisely focused their newer music on their strengths — expansive female harmonies and fun lyrics.
Edward Sharpe’s other incarnation, We Are Each Other, was up next, and while the musicians were exactly the same people as the headlining band, their offbeat Western Gothic sound was a far cry from the upbeat fun that was to come later in the night. It was pretty clear from the reactions among the crowd that the interlude wasn’t too well received among the Zeros fans.
When the band returned to the stage, the observably restless crowd softened quickly to a sing-along of “Janglin,” and Ebertap return as a frontman (he sits on the floor and plays bongos in We Are Each Other).
Ebertap larger-than-life voice is even larger in person, and his onstage persona is that of a traveling reverend for a charismatic order. By the time the Zeros burned through most of the songs from their first full-length, the Zeros had the Ogden balcony visibly bouncing to the beat. The sold-out Ogden lost its collective mind when Ebert and Jade Castrinos began the banter that would become the sweetly romantic hit “Home,” and the seven-minute rendition of the song did not disappoint.
Ebert danced back onto the stage for the Zeros’ first encore, “Man on Fire,” saying he wanted to dance “over warfields, through land mines, between divorcing parents.” The band finished out the balmy summer night with “Brother,” for which he asked the entire front section to have a seat with him on the ground, or on each others’ laps if the floor was too dirty. With that rather Kumbaya touch, the gypsy/hippie/church camp band closed the show and went on to save another city’s sinners.
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Cassandra Schoon is a Denver freelance writer and regular Reverb contributor.
Morgan Varon is a Boulder photojournalist and regular contributor to Reverb. Check out her and .
