Over the past few years, no Halloween weekend in Austin is complete without the sights and sounds of Levitation – a multi-venue celebration of psychedelic music and the adjacent sounds of industrial, metal, ambient, and more. Beginning on Thursday, October 31st, and running through Sunday, November 3rd, this year’s edition featured a nightly residency by Oh Sees, a rare sighting of the ‘70s doom legends Pentagram, and an autumn sound bath by Tycho. Each performance at the event was brought to life with meticulously curated light shows spanning from ‘60s-era liquid light projections to Studio 54-era disco balls to modern LED strobes and floods. One would be hard-pressed to find another music festival so dedicated to psychedelia’s audio and material culture that also immerses concert-goers into a truly elevated experience.
Seeing California-based quintet Oh Sees sell out nearly all four nights at the East Austin venue Hotel Vegas during Levitation was a testament to the Reverberation Society’s impact in building a solid contemporary psych-rock fanbase in the local community, along with selecting a big draw for traveling festivalgoers. Hotel Vegas is one of the local homes for up and coming and established indie rockers throughout the year especially during their annual Spring Break Boogie parties at SXSW music fest. The venerable back yard of Hotel Vegas recently received a facelift in time for Levitation 2024 with new lights and a carpet of Astroturf that reduces the choking clouds of dust that Austin produces after its extremely hot and dry summers.
Presented by local radio station KUTX, an especially muggy Friday night of Levitation 2024 was reserved for a split bill featuring West Coast performers Oh Sees and Death Valley Girls. Fronted by vocalist and keyboardist Bonnie Bloomgarden, the surf psych pop band Death Valley Girls has grown to a septet after their formation over ten years ago and features three back-up singers and a saxophonist, giving the band a 1960s girl group vibe. Sporting an alien vibe with bright colored fishnets, Bloomgarden led the band in the chant “Clear my mind, my heart, my body, and fill me with your will” before kicking the set off with “Abre Camino” from the 2018 album Darkness Rains, a noisy and building tune with a ghoulish Halloween vibe. The bouncing forty-minute set included newer spooky songs such as “Magic Powers” from their last year’s record of the same name, and closed out with a closing chant before ending with the eerie vocal and saxophone-laden soundscape of “Hypnagogia” from the 2020’s Under the Spell of Joy.
Between sets, the crowd on Friday night at Hotel Vegas began to swell and concertgoers were pushed to the edge of the stage where the Oh Sees’ dueling drum kits were assembled. Veterans of Oh Sees shows were well aware that the nursery rhymes piped through the PA were the calm before the storm as the band led by dynamic guitarist and singer John Dwyer began taking their places. Explosive fan favorites “I Come From the Mountain” from the 2013 album Floating Coffin, followed by “The Dream” from 2011’s Clarion Caller/The Dream kicked off the set, and anyone within ten feet of the stage tumbled like laundry as a pair of unruly fans dressed as nuns shot into the mosh pit inciting one of the most raucous sets of the weekend.
Performing a second night in a row after Halloween and during an unseasonably humid evening seemed to take its toll on Dwyer, with ten gallon bags under his eyes and dripping sweat as he kicked his heels and lunged across the stage throughout the night. At the tail end of the performance during the trance-like drumming in the 2011 song “Chem-Farmer”, a dehydrated but not defeated Dwyer unplugged his guitar, hopped off the stage, returned with four beers, and then slammed one before ripping of his tank top and wringing out what seemed to be a pint of sweat before returning to his guitar. Leaving sweaty and bruised at an Oh Sees show is a badge of honor for the psych-rockers growing fan base.
