Passion Pit coming to Cork was an event. The enthusiastic crowd was in frisky form before this free gig, spilling out over the security barriers and into the Cork’s Bowling Green Street. The shrieking had already begun even before the doors opened, amid rumours that the Pit were marooned somewhere in the channel, on the Rosslare Ferry.
Not so, though they were late arriving: it was almost midnight when Michael Angelakos and his band of happy clappy naturists/Linux programmers finally beat out their first tune, but far from having their enthusiasm dampened, the crowd treated it like a catharsis, going impressively gaga at the bouncy ball drum loop and elevated vocal heights of ‘I’ve Got Your Number’.
The euphoric crowd seemed to enliven the evidently embattled Bostonites. “We don‘t expect this kind of reception,” Angelakos confessed through his beard filter, before unleashing the jarring keyboard rhythms and pulsing beats of ‘The Reeling’ and ‘Little Secrets’.
The heavy bass offset by the soaring falsetto vocals made for great disco music, and wild dance-floor revelry followed, with much of Passion’s dreamy synthy aural MDMA-style music swapped for crowd pleasing dancies and euphoric key-phonics. There followed an upbeat encore cover of The Cranberries’ ‘Dreams’, a not-unexpected nod to Munster musical history. In the end, whatever had detained them was overcome and Passion Pit hauled victory from the jaws of defeat. The people who had been happy became positively ecstatic when, during the finale, they released the big blue bouncy balls.
Did no one tell them they should have painted them green?