Teen Daze at The Masquerade, Atlanta, September 9, 2017

In a world where the western half of the North American continent is on fire and it's literally raining ashes in Seattle, where the southeastern portion of the same continent is either underwater or about to be underwater due to a formidable string of record-breaking hurricanes lining up in the North Atlantic, where Mexico is digging out from a devastating earthquake, where monsoons and floods are deluging the Asian subcontinent, aand where North Korea is threatening nuclear war and global annihilation to anyone who'll listen, in such a world, a couple dozen hours or so away from one of those aforementioned hurricanes arriving inside the perimeter around Atlanta, how else is one to respond except by going out to the new and not-at-all-godforsaken Masquerade to hear the British Columbia band Teen Daze?

If you've tried to pigeon-hole my taste in music based on my enthusiastic review of the manic Oh Sees show earlier this week, you might guess that Teen Daze is more of the same thing.  You would be totally wrong.  Although the band's name suggests Katy Perry/Teenage Dream-type pop, Teen Daze is actually a one-man project of some of the gentlest, quietest ambient electronica this side of Juliana Barwick, with occasional brushstrokes of chillwave and dream pop.

Two bands opened for Teen Daze.  Sleepy John & The Boys and Lucky Kitty.  The Boys are a touring band revolving around Sleepy John, an indie/alternative pianist singer-songwriter from Atlanta. Although the band cites Russian Romantic composers, Duke Ellington, and contemporary artists like Bjork, Father John Misty, and Mac Demarco among their influences, their piano-driven songs sound more like Ben Folds and early Billy Joel to my ears.  Their songs were quite well written, and the band was very precise and obviously well rehearsed in their performance. 

 
Lucky Kitty are a shoegaze/dream-pop band out of Athens, Georgia.

There was a lot of audience turnover between bands - there weren't many people in the club, only about 35 to 50 total, and those that were seemed to be there for specific bands.  A group of people who I suspect were family and friends of Sleepy John left after The Boys set and a bunch of young women who watched Lucky Kitty from near the front of the stage all left after the respective band's sets.  About 25 or so people, mostly guys, stayed for Teen Daze.   

And those 25 or so people were well rewarded for their persistence. Jamison Isaak (Teen Daze) played an absolutely lovely set of ambient/dream-pop/chillwave/electronica, quiet enough to let the sounds settle into their own natural places in the room, and with enough occasional synthesized beats and vocals to keep the performance from morphing into some sort of art project. It was all very beautiful and life-affirming and fun, and very much the antidote to the horrors catalogued at the top of this post.

Here's a tasty little sample of the kind of sounds Isaak was producing at The Masquerade last night.

All this, and I got home in time to see the Georgia Bulldogs score the go-ahead field goal at Notre Dame, and then sack the Irish quarterback on the next drive, recovering the football in the process to seal a 20-19 road victory.