Iris, proclaimed by synth-guru DJ Swank as America’s best synthpop band, swung into DC last night on its tour with German synthpop band Seabound to the Rock and Roll Hotel. The show was produced and promoted by Arcadia, an outfit that sponsored a goth/industrial/synth night at Club Five on Thursdays up until recently.
I was surprised by Iris off the bat because the three members opened up with some very strong guitar-driven songs before powering up the synthesizer. Although officially a two-member band consisting of vocalist Reagan Jones and everything man Andrew Sega, Iris sported a third member last night who added greatly to their versatility on stage.
The show was quite enjoyable and the performers were both intent and intense on stage. But many of their key songs simply sound much better on disc than they do live. Iris was playing to promote a remix album, titled Hydra, from this year, which gave them a great excuse to play a lot of their best songs. But tracks like “It Generates” from the album Wrath simply sound better when you can hear the sweeping sonics of the softer synth music below the vocals on the disc as opposed to hearing it live on stage, where it comes out a bit muted. As fellow concert-goer Matt Condon observed, the band’s live performance lacked dynamic range–which would have provided some means of differentiating some of the weaker songs from one another.
Still, the show was well worth a trip to the Atlas District, and I learned a lot more about a pretty good band. Swank must have known that I would have been a sucker for any band whose first single was “Annie, Would I Lie to You?,” a clear reference to the Eurythmics and the genre of 80s New Wave that originally inspired Jones and Sega to start performing
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