Staff Editor on February 17th, 2019

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Chicago rockers Post Animal capped a wild night at the Teragram Ballroom on Saturday with a set of overdriven psych-rock that ended with a huge group effort featuring openings acts Ron Gallo and his band and members of Stuyedeyed.

Headlining this night’s rendition of the “2019 United Steaks Tour” with Gallo, Post Animal took the stage and immediately matched the intense energy of the openers. Playing a number of their heavier songs off their album “When I Think of You in a Castle,” Post Animal got had the all-ages crowd thrashing around.

At one point during a song, guitarist Jake Hirshland handed his guitar off to a kid from the audience who we later found out was named Nate. Nate absolutely shredded the rest of that song while Hirshland dove off into the crowd. After getting his guitar back and having the crowd show Nate some well-deserved praise, Hirshland told the crowd he had a dream where he was crowd surfing to their song, while someone else played guitar, and seemed satisfied that it came true. After Post Animal cruised through the rest of their head-banging set, with Stuyedeyed’s frontman Nelson Antonio Hernandez-Espinal coming out to simultaneously crowd-surf and play bass, they brought out all the rest of the members of Ron Gallo and Stuyedeyed. Grabbing every mic they could find, the whole group came off the stage and into the crowd to sing one last song together surrounded by their fans.

Gallo started his set by carrying a ladder onstage to reach his unusually tall microphone stand to utter a simple “hello,” before putting away the ladder and lowering his mic. After receiving a quick laugh, he and his band got right into it. As he has done in the past, Gallo took out and read a note addressing who they were and thanking the crowd for coming before getting cut off by his band for their next song. During a song near the end of his set Gallo handed his guitar to a girl in the front of the crowd, encouraging her to play whatever she wanted as the rest of the band jammed on. Twisting and turning knobs on his array of pedals, Gallo looked on enthusiastically as the crowd cheered on the girl strumming away.

Kicking off the night with a blast, Brooklyn’s Stuyedeyed (pronounced Sty’d-Eyed) owned the moment. Nearing the end of their set they were joined by the drummers from both Gallo’s band and Post Animal to help pound away on one of their songs, before closing out their set with a ruckus: Singer-guitarist Hernandez-Espinal tossed aside his mic stand to stand almost on top of the crowd while guitarist George Ramirez threw his guitar across the stage into Luis Ruelas’ drum kit.

Photos and recap by Samuel C. Ware