Kevin Bronson on January 27th, 2013

0

Two hours at the Mayan Theatre on Wednesday night with the Airborne Toxic Event, and one thing is for certain: They have refined the craft of crowd-pleasing.

The quintet roared out of Silver Lake in 2007-08, black-dressed romantics who were the perfect antidote to indie nation’s arms-crossed indifference. They were fronted by music nerd, aspiring author and former rock journo Mikel Jollett, who pined for girls in summer dresses and moped about the one, in the white dress, who got away.

• ||| Photos by Carl Pocket

With “Sometime Around Midnight” all over rock radio, TATE released its debut in 2008. In a typical spate of over-intellectualizing Pitchfork famously called bullsh*t, and then the band ill-advisedly fired back, a still-amusing dust-up four-plus years later. Even if you insist on numerological distinctions, the album was no more a 1.8 than any of the reverb-y piffle or fifth-wave garage-rock that gets Best New Music these days. On the other hand, the Airborne Toxic Event came off as a band exceedingly desperate to be regarded as important. And we hadn’t even heard that second album yet.

No matter. The band was upstreamed to a major label, went on to sell 234,000 copies of the album and capped their hard-touring ways in December 2009 with a celebratory (and some would say self-congratulatory, if you watch the DVD) concert at Disney Hall.

Airborne’s second album, 2011’s “All At Once,” was a polished if ponderous collection of songs that tried, all at once, to be U2, Springsteen and Modest Mouse – you know, artists that immerse themselves in weighty matters. The album might have face-planted at 90,000 in sales, but the Little Arena Rock Band That Could has soldiered on undaunted, becoming an absolutely electric live force.

Which they were Wednesday night during a crisply choreographed set that included three songs from their forthcoming third album “Such Hot Blood,” due in April. Along with Wednesday’s openers White Arrows, TATE is scheduled to play Coachella in April, the fivesome’s second visit to Indio after a memorable outing in 2009.

Jollett is hardly believable as a jilted knight-errant anymore, not standing there sleeveless, and certainly not with such capable wingmen. Daren Taylor is a furiously punktastic drummer, and he and locked-kneed bassist Noah Harmon give Airborne enough thunder to carry any room. Steven Chen is meticulous and brooding whether on guitar or keys, and whether contributing viola, keyboards or vocals, Anna Bulbrook is so spot-on and charismatic fans just want to breathe her same oxygen. And to a person, their onstage body language is just so. Where is that girl in the white dress now?

If she were at the Mayan on Wednesday, she was probably singing along. Everybody else was. From the opener, a stadium-ready rendition of the sophomore album’s title track to the show-ending medley (more on that later), it was clear the capacity crowd had spent some time with Jollett’s lyrics. The frontman barely needed to sing first-album songs at all, so clear was the crowd’s chorus during tunes such as “Wishing Well,” “Gasoline,” “Does This Mean You’re Moving On?,” “Innocence” and, of course “Sometime Around Midnight.”

And owing to TATE’s fans having posted live videos of songs the band has thus far only played live, the Mayan crowd revealed it had done its homework. There’s a familiar ache to “The Storm” and “What’s In a Name,” and the fivesome ratcheted up the already-high intensity for the well-intentioned but plodding new single “Timeless,” which, Jollett recently told Billboard, was written during a time of great personal duress.

Over the course of the proceedings, the set included a lovely “Duet” (Jollett and Bulbrook), the seemingly obligatory drum circle and several forays into the crowd – with Bulbrook getting some fine surfing in during the finale.

That second encore ended with the band wrapping its song “Missy” around three classics, “Ring of Fire,” “American Girl” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” a button-pushing mix that got an appropriately delirious reception. You never know with the Airborne Toxic Event, though, whether the medley is a mere celebration of their influences or a tacit statement that they somehow belong in that company. Five-plus years later, that is what passes for their mystique.

◊ ◊ ◊

White Arrows’ spacey electro was largely lost in the Mayan’s muddy mix, and the quintet seemed to sense it. Playing songs from last year’s fine album “Dry Land Is Not a Myth,” Mickey Church and gang were substantially less in-your-face than in other recent outings. Or maybe their wry and slightly druggy material was lost on the earnest and mostly sober crowd.

They hit their stride with the single “Get Gone,” which got some heads bobbing, at least, but the quintet would have done well to watch the well-oiled live apparatus that was the headliners.