Kevin Bronson on November 1st, 2013

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By Ben McShane

On the week that youth culture pioneer Lou Reed died, the representative youth of Los Angeles sold-out the Hollywood Palladium for a night of music that spanned the gamut of today’s artless radio genres – let’s settle on “dark pop” for argument’s sake – and mingled without urgency, representing what was once directly lived.

The big attraction was the Neighbourhood, the local-guys-making-good who released their debut album “I Love You” in April and have ever since seen that love reciprocated. After selling out the Wiltern in August, the quintet scheduled a return trip, only to have the show moved to the more expansive Palladium to accommodate demand.

• ||| Photos by Kelsey Heng

Liver-quivering bass rumbled intermittently during Ghost Loft’s pointless opening set, largely ignored save for a few questionable souls who recorded the whole thing on their phones. That was followed by Lovelife, a pale imitation of the U.K. alternative dance acts that occasionally plagued Top 40 in the 1990s and presaged today’s unified radio format.

But ambivalence gave way to exuberance when the headliners took the stage. “Is everybody okay?” asked frontman Jesse Rutherford during his entrance, answered by a roaring crowd. “We’re called The Neighbourhood, and we’re from Newbury Park. This is a song about that,” he stated plainly, before launching into a moody, sense-shattering performance of “Let It Go.” It was a fine rebuke to skeptics who might otherwise cast his band into the same lot of faceless music that bombards us daily in 2013. The hit-or-miss set teased between popular sensibility and sensory provocation, mating ambient dark waves with R&B groove. It was better than the standard fare and a mutual embrace between the band and their fans.

Don’t let the Neighbourhood’s dark brooding textures fool you. What they’re selling is aspirational pop music, a secret world between the band and the listeners where everyone is a covert person with sensual secrets to be revealed, hiding shades of passion behind a veneer of disinterested cool. When the set peaked with “W.D.Y.W.F.M.” – they saved their big hit “Sweater Weather” for later – it was as though a bomb had gone off. Even jaded rockists had to reckon with its cross-genre might. Not bad for a bunch of kids from just up the 101.

And yet, how is the oft-repeated line in their song “Flawless,” “I just can’t wait for love to destroy us” any less vapid than “It feels like I’m just too close to love you,” the ubiquitous refrain from that damnable Alex Clare track that conquered airwaves in 2011? Is the Neighbourhood really more interesting than the rest, or are local allegiances showing?

In truth, it doesn’t matter. The band is a bonafide success, and not without merit. To quote the Neighbourhood’s draconian peers, “Welcome to the New Age.”

Indeed.

||| Live: The Neighbourhood plays tonight at the Observatory.

Ben McShane is a freelance writer and occasional contributor to Buzz Bands LA