Concerts have been a go in New York City for a little while now. Their return on an appreciable scale was first and quietly signaled by rough-and-tumble DIY venues (some of them really people’s backyards) throwing small shows in early June or so, often sheepishly asking for proof of vaccination at the door. Then, perhaps less than a month later, more sizable spaces like Brooklyn’s Our Wicked Lady and Elsewhere (both notably brandishing rooftops) and Manhattan’s The Bowery Electric started to let people into their 200+-capacity spaces, to let those people not wear masks, let them kiss and dance and whatever, usually but not always with proof of vaccination required as well. Fellow Sputnikmusic compatriot ArsMoriendi and I, neither of us from NYC but both sorta equidistant to it, had to check this new (but really actually old) phenomenon out.

Or, well, that’s kinda how it happened. Above all and in the first place, we were stoked to see a Facebook event advertising the first “post”-COVID show of a band whose hyperactive, glammy and psychedelic debut LP we together hawked on this very site, with some minor notable successes. The album is called Long Haired Locusts (2020); the band is called Godcaster. We had heard they were awesome live, and proof of their dominance in the arena of live performance was everywhere on the Internet (check out this clip, awesomely shot by one Santo Donia, of a 2019 show in New Jersey), and even felt like it inhered in the math-y, frenetic hooks that make…