Live Reviews

Oh, the humidity!

Hot times at ArtBeat 2008

By MATT PARISH | July 22, 2008

Township

There was a shiny trail of slobber leading down the path underfoot from the Davis Square T back through a gantlet of Somerville clipboard activists into Seven Hills Park, home of the ArtBeat festival’s main stage last Saturday. It twisted and glistened until finally leading up to a whale-sized mastiff beached on the pavement like a rusty anchor, head in a pool of drool, dreaming of days when his owner limited his socializing to the Internet. The Tex-Mex combo Los Nitodos bounced around on stage in soccer jerseys and flip-flops (perhaps the best wardrobe decision by any band of the day) while women in sundresses did the wave-your-arms-back-and-forth-we’re-outside! dance. Fleetingly delicious Olde Tyme slushies quickly melted into sticky Kool-Aid soup. The weekend-long ArtBeat festival was under way!

At a smaller stage over by Redbones, the David Wax Museum fiddle-folksie group sang in three-part harmonies while across the street the metallic silver-painted living-statue girl was calling it quits before the make-up melted her eyes shut. She took off through the dense crowd in a tank top, a few steps ahead of a walking pine tree, past sweating, sizzling slabs of meat disintegrating on grills parked at the Square’s nexus, one older vendor entreating passers-by, “Do not walk away from my lemonade, I really want to go home!”

Back at Seven Hills Park, Township crept on stage as if they hadn’t seen the outdoors in weeks. But Boston’s most endearingly ’70s dudes nevertheless kicked into some fuzzy, shuffling Guitar Hero–ready anthems the way only a quartet of glaringly pasty dudes with sleeveless shirts can do in a field full of dogs and toddlers and a growing crowd of sweating revelers. The sun went and ducked behind a cloud, and Township’s Marc Pinansky finally took a peek out at the crowd. “It’s good to see people I don’t know. Maybe we’ll all get to know each other, someday, through the Internet.”