All weekend the Reverb staff will be sharing short scenes from UMS 2014. On day No. 3 we spent time analyzing the behavior of people waiting in lines, the quick turn from anger to peacefulness that can happen on stage, the rarity of country music at The UMS and, well, Cop Circles.
The Person Waiting in Line is a simple and emotional beast. There is the Person Waiting in Line who embraces the inevitability of being in “a row or sequence of people awaiting their turn to be attended to or to proceed.” These people will typically find a way to pass the time by meeting people around them and making polite conversation. Then there’s the Person Waiting in Line who is distraught, aggravated and impatient. This Person Waiting in Line spends the time in line complaining, analyzing the speed of the line and getting hostile with anyone who appears to be cutting. These people will likely be the ones trying to skip the line, meet a friend up at the front or sneak in. Anyone who tried to enter on Saturday night a had more than enough opportunity to analyze the traits of the Person Waiting in Line. Consider this Woman Waiting in Line for American Tomahawk at the Hi-Dive. She falls into the aggravated and impatient category. After a 20-minute wait the woman was four people away from the door when she decided she couldn’t take it anymore. “They’re not letting anyone in until this band is done,” she said as she left the line with a huff and stormed down the sidewalk. Two minutes later the group behind her was through the doors. — Matt Miller
was having a perfectly lovely set at shortly after 10 p.m. on Saturday night when a drunken audience member jumped center-stage, blocking self-described “blonde babe drummer” and vocalist Hanna Brewer. And by lovely I mean full of hard-hitting, lockstep ’90s beats that drove the tight bass grooves and slicing but lab-precise guitar. She stopped singing and began screaming at the dude to get off the stage, letting loose an impressively hoarse litany of profanities that continued through the rest of the song, when drunk dude stepped on/unplugged the guitarist’s amp cord. “Look what you did, you dumb motherfucker!” she seethed, demanding the audience point out where the guy had disappeared to. Sensing the souring mood, and the fact that this guy could easily become the victim of a group beatdown by the also-plastered room, guitarist Taylor Busby interrupted Brewer with calls of “Hey, no, it’s OK! It’s cool! Good vibes, everybody. Good vibes.” They finished the song, after which Brewer apologized to the crowd for losing her temper, sounding genuinely sorry she had done so. It was a generous turn of events and one that proved it’s OK to leave the aggression on stage, in the music, as opposed to making it a theme of the night for everyone at the venue, or the festival for that matter. Would it have mattered if she was a dude, for whom creative aggression is more acceptable and encouraged in society? Nope. Brewer’s aggro stance translates great into her music, but tearing the head off of a stupid audience member and parading it around on a stick wouldn’t have done anyone any favors. — John Wenzel
Just one day after a , the venue was carrying on undaunted, packed to the brim and putting on a good show late into Saturday evening. Downstairs, the bustling bar ran out of its hard-to-find Lone Star beer around 10 p.m. White Rascal would have to suffice, as took the stage. Hooting and hollering could be heard amid the twang of lilting guitar lines. People weren’t so much dancing as bobbing to the music, enjoying the songs by passing around cowboy hats and fedoras. The honky-tonk feel continued with Whiskey Shivers, which took the stage around 11 p.m. The Texas-based band had people clapping, dancing and stomping their feet throughout the entirety of its set thanks to the fast-tempo union of virtuosic upright bass, fiddle, washboard, banjo and guitar. (There was word there might be some fire-breathing from the washboard player, who had a get-up like Luigi from Super Mario Bros., but sadly this didn’t happen.) Excitement was in the air through the very last song, an encore that brought the band members into the heart of the crowd, fans surrounding them, hugging them, high-fiving them and applauding them off into the night. — Sean Fitz-Gerald
10 p.m. on Saturday night was a glimpse of what aliens probably do for entertainment on the weekends. Despite the gallery’s cramped space and awkward layout (there is a large column blocking part of the stage), the vibes were incredible. If Mars had a dance club, this would be it. , the one-man act that rocks a keytar and some ironically-heavy auto tune, was in town. At first his bizarre vocals and nonsensical rhymes garnered only giggles and curious smiles, but somewhere after the second song he mesmerized the crowd with his funky, electro beats. It was a galactic mix of head bobbing, random hand motions and jumping that would make aliens proud. Except for an awkward mid-performance speech, Luke Leavitt (the man behind Cop Circles) shredded his keytar and wailed out his songs with the confidence of a superstar athlete. — Jordan Gonzalez
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