Future Islands, Ed Schrader's Music Beat and Sports at the Vera Project

Saturday was a busy day, I had to run down to the Vera Project early in the afternoon to report to the Vera Project board meeting as the Veracity chair, then I checked out the "Short Run" small book publisher's fair while I was there.

The picture above is just a small area, they had tables up all over the venue in the lobby and the show room, plus animations showing back in the green room. I ended up buying a few interesting zines and comics, then heading home to pick up Ben and his friends to head down to the evening show. I was steering and the boys were all volunteering. We had a big crew of volunteers so the boys weren't working too hard for sure!

The music was good and the crowd was reasonably large and engaged - we got more dancing at this show than we usually get, which always makes me enjoy the show more.

The first band to take the stage was Sports.

Sports had a nice dancey vibe, quite enjoyable, and it kept the audience moving.

The drummer had a minimal set, one cymbal, a snare and a bass drum, but he worked the heck out of it. I commented to some of the volunteers on how minimal the drums were, but the next band topped that pretty easily!

Ed Schrader's Music Beat had a dude playing one drum and singing and a bass player, a pretty minimal setup.

They got a solid full sound for such a minimal setup, which was cool. The lighting effect with the single light under the drum was interesting too. I looked them up on YouTube ahead of time and listened to "I Can't Stop Eating Sugar" which was a fun song:



Next Future Islands took the stage for the headline set.

They had a slightly non-standard lineup, with a guitarist, a keyboard, and a singer. They used sequencers for the drums, I assume.

They had an interesting lighting setup with floodlights in various colors around the stage, occasionally it's hard to see what's going on on the videos. Interesting sound, the vocalist has a good range of tones available to him which drew my attention. The vocalist also had some different moves, frequently squatting down pretty low which made him a bit hard to see from the audience on occasion, but he drew your eye and kept your attention.


So I saw a good variety of interesting stuff at the Vera; I'm not sure exactly what you call the music from the last 2 acts, but I definitely enjoyed it, and so did the audience. They hung around a fair bit after the show, visiting with the bands and buying merchandise, so everyone went home happy - I like it when things go well.