From five rows back, Ted Leo’s skinny silhouette looks cut off at the waist. Between here and there, where he’s standing on-stage at afterHOURS, a fraction of the large crowd – about 200 Northeastern students – is dancing, blocking any clear view of the singer-songwriter and his band, the Pharmacists.
When he snaps his head to the beat, sweat sprays around the room. For more than 10 years, commercial acclaim has mostly eluded Leo but at 38 years old, with plans to release a fifth full-length album, he hasn’t forsaken rock ‘n’ roll.
“I recommend sweat bands,” said Rebecca Dufendach, a senior history major. “Those guys were working hard up there.”
Last night, the D.C. quartet brought to Northeastern their particular, poppy blend of punk-meets-rock-meets-ska, sometimes boisterous or exuberant and almost always pushed along by a clear political message.
When the band went on just after 9 p.m., it took only a couple of songs to warm up the crowd. For about an hour before the show, they’d waited in a line that snaked out the door into the drizzling rain and cold. But as Leo and the Pharmacists slipped from opener “Sons of Cain” into “Me and Mia,” a sing-a-long favorite, everyone thawed out as the band sampled its discography, favoring 2007’s bristling Living with the Living album and showing off two new tracks.
If Living was a somewhat subtle departure from the pop-heavy anthems that characterized the Pharmacists’ first three records, the group’s new tracks suggest a heartfelt return, hinged on tight rhythm guitar and catchy refrains. Leo said the band hopes to drop its next record this fall.
Though Leo and the Pharmacists lingered on Living, with tracks like “Colleen,” “Bottle of Buckie” and “Bomb. Repeat. Bomb,” the group fleshed out its set with older tracks like “Timorous Me,” “Biomusicology,” “Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?” and “Little Dawn.” “Little Dawn” unexpectedly – and temporarily – gave way to a cover of “One More Time” by French house duo Daft Punk.
“This was the sixth Ted show I’ve been to in the past three years,” said Mike Cash, a middler international affairs major. “It’s probably up there with the top two or three. It was a great atmosphere: A small crowd, real enclosed and intimate.”
Leading up to Leo, local dance-pop pros Passion Pit roused the crowd with a set full of ecstatic synths, whimsical vocals and unshakable beats.
Between sets, student models showed off clothes in fashion shows by Karma Loop and BANK, co-founded by Northeastern middler Nani Stoick. WRBB also raffled off five prize packages that included $100 gift cards to Karma Loop, said Bethany Leavey, a junior music industry major and WRBB general manager.
The station organized the show in conjunction with the Council for University Programs. Leavey said though the groups had considered other bands for the event, when Leo’s name was brought up at a meeting, everyone seemed to agree.
“He’s got a beautiful voice, No. 1,” she said. “And the stuff he sings is so universal. Not typical love-lost stuff, but keeping fighting stuff. And who doesn’t want to keep fighting?”
