Mod Lang sets a warm retro stage as the D’Addario brothers turn The Garden Amp into a glittering, high-voltage time warp of pure rock ecstasy.
Friday nights at the Garden Amp carry a particular kind of charged expectation. The crowd arrives already animated, loosened by the week’s end, ready to give themselves over to something. On this night, both acts on the bill were more than worthy of that surrender.
Mod Lang opened with the easy confidence of a band that has nothing left to prove and everything left to enjoy. The young men from Detroit wore their influences plainly – 70s power pop, Beatles-esque harmonies, jangly guitars that chimed rather than rang. There was a looseness to the set that felt deliberate, a warm-up-the-room looseness that suited the space and the hour. The vocals sat high and warm in the mix, the kind of blend that takes years to develop and sounds effortless once it arrives. Mod Lang didn’t try to own the room; they simply inhabited it, and the crowd let them settle in.
What they offered was a reminder that not every opening set needs to announce itself. Sometimes the best support is the kind that tilts the room toward something – a mood, an era, a frequency – and trusts the headliner to carry it forward. By the time Mod Lang closed out, the Garden Amp felt primed, a little warmer, a little more open.
The Lemon Twigs arrived without ceremony and immediately without apology. Brian and Michael D’Addario are a specific kind of anomaly – two brothers who seem to have absorbed every great record made between 1966 and 1979 and then decided, collectively, that none of it was excessive enough. Live, that philosophy pays out in full. The stage setup was modest by arena standards, but the performance was anything but, opening with a blast of harmonized sugar-rush rock that landed somewhere between Todd Rundgren and early Queen, with a detour through Nilsson that nobody asked for but everyone needed.
All the band members are multi-instrumentalists, and frequently swap instruments during the set. Brian commands the front of the stage with an almost theatrical physicality – arms wide, voice climbing into registers that shouldn’t hold, then holding. Michael, on lead guitar and behind the kit, is the engine that refuses to idle. Together, they operate on a kind of sibling telepathy that can’t be rehearsed into existence; either you have it, or you don’t. They have it in excess.
The setlist moved through the band’s catalog with an assurance that suggested a band fully in command of its own myth. Older tracks carried new weight; newer material landed with the familiarity of things already half-remembered. When the room finally got what it had been leaning toward all night, the response was less a cheer than a collective exhale and pleas for more– the sound of an audience that had been holding something in and finally let it go.
By the final number, the Garden Amp felt sealed off from the outside world, a snow globe shaken hard and left to settle. Not every Friday night ends that way. This one did.
THE LEMON TWIGS
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THE GARDEN AMP
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