Current Joys, never goodbye

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Bedroom recordings got popular enough to become a genre, which very nearly ruined the thing that made them matter in the first place. The appeal was never the lo-fi texture. It was the sense that you were hearing something not meant for an audience, recorded by somebody who assumed nobody would ever ask. Hold onto that and the live version becomes strange and good: a few hundred people in a room, all of whom first heard these songs alone and privately, singing them at each other. The crowd skews young and knows every word, and there is an intensity to that which catches older people off guard. It is not a polite indie show. Expect the sad ones to be the loudest. A small east-side room is exactly the right scale for it, and in a few years the people there will be insufferable about having seen it in a place this size, which is its own kind of recommendation.