Live Review: Ducktails at MoMA

29 Jul 2013 — Henry Schiller

On July 25, Ducktails played a free set in the outdoor sculpture garden of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.

When I say free, I mean that the show was free for museum guests; so anywhere from 14 to 25 USD. MoMA is far and away my least favorite museum in New York City. It's corporate and bland, and it reminds me of a very modern office building or a research facility. MoMA feels as though it is meant to present you with a packaged version of New York pretension.

I mention this because I was wholly expecting Ducktails to be pigeonholed into MoMA's bland aesthetic, their sound somehow compromised by its whitewashed plasticine walls; I couldn't have been more wrong. The set felt like it was somewhere between watching buskers in Central Park and going to a Summer Stage show. The set was wonderful, but moreover, the experience itself was wonderful. There were no more than 50 seats up by the stage area and the show was otherwise not particularly crowded. The group’s sound – based as it is on heavily modulated guitars – was complimented tremendously by the space’s natural reverb, but not overwashed in the way it might be by an amphitheater. Matt Mondanile’s vocals were soft and clear: he was singing to a living room, not a stadium.

Ducktails started as the solo project of Real Estate’s Matt Mondanile, but he's now backed by members of New Jersey band Big Troubles. As such, the Ducktails sound has changed from lo-fi guitar loops to something that rests in the intermediary of Van Morrison, Destroyer, and The English Beat. Ducktails played a couple of tracks from this year’s The Flower Lane LP, including “Under Cover”, “The Flower Lane”, and the Peter Gutteridge cover “Planet Phrom.” Jessa Farkas from Future Shuttle jumped on stage for the shared-vocal dream pop number “Letter of Intent” and the set ended with a new(?) piece that sounded like Coltrane via Grizzly Bear and was the best thing I heard all night.

The show was very much geared towards “museum goers” and as such had an unusually chill atmosphere. Mondanile mentioned how local to the Manhattan area his group is (hailing, as they do, from New Jersey and Long Island), and posited that we, the audience, were probably from around here too. There was a startling intimacy to the whole thing. During the entire set, which took place in front of a large window into the museum, patrons could be seen snapping photos of Mondanile and co.’s backs. This show was a part of MoMA’s ongoing MoMA Nights series in conjunction with PopRally, so if you’re in the New York area I would consider spending a Thursday night at the MoMA. Ducktails is playing another free show (this time with Titus Andronicus) in New York’s Hudson River Park on August 8.