With Longboat Hall transformed into a surreal garden of distorted flora and fauna, Dilly Dally found the perfect ecosystem for their hazy aggression.
After ripping off the Band-Aid with blistering renditions of "Snake Head" and "Ballin' Chain," they tested the waters with a new, slow one that floated piercing noise guitars over a marching rhythm section, and the band broke for water.
Katie Monks greeted the audience with a mock-demure "What's up, how's it going? How's life? How's your summer?" and then they were off into their cover of Drake's "Know Yourself," that upwardly mobile anthem turned mutant pinning everyone and screaming down their throats in the dripping haze of General Chaos's painted swirls and Versa's visual abstractions. At one point, the disorienting conditions sent guitarist Liz Ball tripping over her monitor and the band's leads dropped out, but no one in the band missed a messy beat, and with some help from folks in the pit, Ball was back on her feet to fight through the rest of the set.
As if hypnotized, the crowd was remarkably static throughout all of this, but full of whoops and cheers, and after that snarled "One, two, three, four…" that kicks off Sore, Dilly Dally capped it off with "Desire" and sent everyone off hungry for a new album.
