Live Concert Photography: Vivid Dreams at Rockwood Music Hall
May 17, 2015
As you can imagine, since starting JOVM five years ago, I receive an overwhelming number of invites to shows in the NYC area and with the diversity and amount of shows going on across town, it often leads to difficult (and honestly enviable) decisions. A while ago, I received an invite to catch a local indie rock band, Vivid Dreams at the Lower East Side’s Rockwood Music Hall. The band is the brainchild of Nicholas Bush, a NYC-based guitarist and songwriter and sonically, the band draws from the influences of Neil Young, Nick Cave, Pixies, Sonic Youth, T. Rex, Ty Segall, Foxygen and Cate Le Bon; in other words, led by Bush, the members of Vivid Dreams employ a prototypical psych rock sound – tons of feedback but based around a decidedly garage rock/garage pop sound that reminds me a little bit of Raccoon Fighter and others.
As far as their live set, there were a couple of niggling problems. Mainly, I felt that the set could have been tighter, as there were lulls as far as figuring out what they were going to play or to figure out how much time was left in their set; it gave the sense that the band hadn’t played a set in some time and was rusty. They’ll have to work on it a bit but at its core, the material puts a contemporary spin on a very familiar sound.
Check out some photos below.
Photos by Leigh Greaney of Thought Pollution.
