CYCLONE ROCK Dom’s face-off with the Coney Island roller-coaster ended in a draw. |
NEW YORK — There are about 300 people here, it's 94 degrees, and Worcester's finest lo-fi frontman is singing about his cat beside a roller-coaster.
Dom the band are the opening act of the this past Saturday's 10th-anniversary Siren Festival — a free, all-day concert funded by the Village Voice (disclaimer: my employer) that takes place annually on Coney Island. The main stage sits beside a rattletrap puke monster called the Cyclone, so while the band's long-haired ginger brat-punk namesake sneers, somewhat proudly, about things like burning bridges, his kitty Bochicha, and the way living in America is "soo sexxxxxxxy," his main competition is the ride's CHK-CHK-CHK-CHK.
Three hours later, Dom and his guitarist Cosmo are backstage drinking rider-supplied Budweiser, playfully squirting folks with a Super Soaker, and trying to recall just how the hell they got here. It began this past New Year's Eve, Dom explains, when he went to a "really wack" party, saw his ex-girlfriend kiss his friend, went home, "broke a bunch of shit," at some point took ecstasy, and then wrote a song about coping with the experience that the Internet has come to know and to love as "Jesus."
First Fader noticed, then other music blogs, and "then I just decided, 'Hey, I love this attention. Let's write some more songs, boys.' " Dom met Cosmo at a honky-tonk night in Brooklyn this year; Cosmo has since become one of those boys.
Dom figures, if none of this had happened, he'd probably be scraping his bowl for resin somewhere in Massachusetts. Speaking of which: strangers keep approaching the pink-shirted slacker and shouting out random cities like Grafton. But Dom, who says he's moved around all his life, isn't sure how much his year-old Worcester residence matters. "I guess your environment is conducive to what you create æsthetically, but it's not really too important. I mean, you can write some pretty good books in prison."
