by Petyr Campos
Broncho, the Norman, Oklahoma quartet brought thirty songs and fifteen years of being criminally underrated to The Independent on Monday night. By the time frontman Ryan Lindsey slouched up to the microphone on Divisadero Street, the room was already primed: not by an opening act, but by something stranger and more fitting. In lieu of the traditional opener-to-headliner formula, the band screened a 45-minute art-house infomercial and documentary titled The Making of Double Vanity, directed by Jaret Ferratusco.
Few bands capture the cinematic quality of early ’80s post-punk and new wave as effectively as Broncho’s fuzzy guitars, sing-along choruses, minimal yet driving drumming, arriving at a sound that’s both nostalgic and timeless. Live, that description barely scratches the surface. It almost didn’t feel like they performed a thirty-song setlist. That’s the Broncho trick: they make abundance feel effortless. Songs bleed into one another with the logic of a long, strange dream nothing overstays its welcome and everything lands. Lindsey’s voice hovered just above a whisper and somehow cut through everything. That quality, unusual, high, oddly soothing was the night’s through-line. He doesn’t so much enunciate words as softly caress them. Penny Pitchlynn anchored it all on bass with a quiet authority, while Ben King’s guitar lines spiraled and locked into Nathan Price’s minimal, driving percussion.
The Independent is a room that suits them perfectly. Intimate enough to feel the reverb in your chest, large enough that the band can fill it without straining. There is something about the physics of that space that collapses the distance between performer and audience; you stop watching a show and find yourself inside one. By the end of the night, on Divisadero, with nowhere special to be, it felt like exactly the right place to be.
