The crowd slowly grew between performances by fellow local band Lech and Lexington, Ky., band Idiot Glee. By the time local band Frankie and the Witch Fingers took the stage, the audience crowded around the stage with several groups dancing around.
The first two songs played were fast and loud, and the vibrations of the music could be felt through the floor.
The crowd was made up of both longtime fans and people like IU student Vivek Bigelow, who had never heard of most of the bands. He said he decided to go to the show after seeing the event on Facebook.
“I came to just rock my face off,” Bigelow said.
Saturday night’s show served as the album release party for Frankie and the Witch Fingers’ new self-titled album. The band officially released the album Feb. 17 as a follow-up to their 2013 debut, “Sidewalk.”
While the first album was initially a demo tape the band wound up releasing, vocalist and guitarist Dylan Sizemore said the new album is more layered and complete.
“This is more of a band thing, while the first one was kind of just figuring out what the project would be,” he said.
Sizemore said he wrote some of the songs on the album a few years ago when he was in a different band. He said he wrote a lot more music at the time than the band actually ever played, so he thought he would start a side project. That side project eventually grew into Frankie and the Witch Fingers.
The songs are mostly about his personal life, he said, but told in a ?metaphorical way.
“A lot of it has to do with my upbringing and religion,” Sizemore said. “It’s a culmination of that and what I’m experiencing now. I like to take the energy of Pentecostal or church and then mix that in with psychedelic music because they’re very similar.”
Frankie and the Witch Fingers play ‘60s music with a new spin, Sizemore said. He also said the band has always been inspired by a lot of California bands, and that is part of why they are relocating from Bloomington to Los Angeles.
It was interesting that the show spanned a lot of genres, Suna said.
