Kevin Bronson on October 19th, 2014

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If you’ve followed the trials and tribulations of L.A. sextet Afternoons for the better part of a decade, what befell them at their album-release show Friday night at El Cid absolutely, positively certified the band as star-crossed.

Midway through Afternoons’ set celebrating the long-awaited release of “Say Yes,” drummer Brent Turner’s kick pedal busted beyond repair. (“And I’ve only been using it 20 years,” he deadpanned later.) There was nary a replacement in the house. So a musician who was in the crowd, Dan Wistrom, clambered onstage and proceeded to sit in front of the bass drum and manually pound it, getting cues from Turner’s tapping foot. And later, another ace drummer who was in the house, Denny Weston Jr., joined in on a floor tom to add the necessary oomph for the title track …

… Which, by the way, almost didn’t happen because keyboardist Aaron Burrows’ set-up was cutting in and out.

Somewhere on a big soundstage in the sky, the gods of music had to be cackling:
Afternoons – who, after all, “began recording this album in 2007,” as singer-guitarist Steven Scott pointed out – finally had the goods (with Shepard Fairey-designed artwork and all), and now all this was going down. But a funny thing happened on the way to the trainwreck: The show went on, and in explosive fashion.

With Michael Regilio filling in on bass with singer-guitarists Scott and Brian Canning, singer Claire McKeown, Burrows and Turner, Afternoons delivered a set every bit as muscular and exuberant as when they were next-big-things around 2008. Lineup shifts, a name change, some business missteps and a reboot under their original name (all of which you should read about here) have done little to subvert the original power of their songs, indie-pop anthems with arena-sized choruses and a literary yet romantic worldview.

Those songs – “Say Yes,” which put them on the map way back when, along with highlights like “Love Is a Western Word,” “Gloria” and “Graffiti Artist” – still somehow sound better live than on record, especially with some of the original horn parts having been replaced on the new recordings by synths. The duality between Canning’s more dry, lower-register delivery and Scott’s boyish vocals is more pronounced on stage, not to mention McKeown’s operatic backdrop and harmonies.

• ||| Stream: The whole album here.

Still, everything synched almost magically Friday night, including the evening’s lineup – fellow troupers from Silver Lake’s old guard who showed how well their music, old and new, holds up. The Little Ones, the quintet whose joyous, polyrhythmic pop arrived on the L.A. scene around the same time Afternoons rose from the ashes of Irving, inspired bouts of happy-dancing, and Joel Jerome, playing with his Crazy Rust lineup that included Trevor Beld-Jimenez, closed the place down with songs off his new solo album and, finally, a Beatles medley.

Aaron Espinoza of Earlimart opened the night with a rapturous solo set that included genteel electronic backing tracks, reworkings of some of his older songs and some ethereal projections.

Photos by Mel Kadel