Saturday night at the Vera was my second time seeing Ponytail, but my first time being able to actually see the band (last I saw them in Austin they were playing on a very low stage, making their diminutive lead singer Molly Siegel all but invisible). It makes a fairly big difference, given how much Siegel's facial expressions, alternately screwed-up retarded and ecstatically grinning, and anti-gravity pogoing add to the show. Infectious is a criminally overused word, but it's hard to find a better one to describe Siegel's enthusiasm onstage. It certainly got to the smallish crowd, who were dancing and jumping around and crowd surfing throughout the set. (A funny thing about crowd surfing when there's a small crowd, a crowd that doesn't even begin to fill up the physical space of the room: to support the surfer, the whole crowd has to mass together, arms up, angled inward and upward like an altar, and the surfer has nowhere to actually surf, because the whole crowd is already holding him up—the whole mass can sort of wobble, many-legged, one way or another, but there's nowhere for the kid held aloft to roll or be passed on to.)

The band sounded great, dual guitars looped and refracted and bursting into upward-spiraling riffs, the drummer going consistently nuts on the kit, switching times and just busting out ridiculous rhythms heavy on the toms and woodblock. Siegel's vocal outbursts ("oh let's go"?) are like baby-talk, almost words only with important consonants missing, emotive but unintelligible (also: Siegel is fittingly baby-faced; also also: her aforementioned facial expressions, grimacing and happy with no apparent connection to the events taking place in the band's songs, reminded me of how sometimes a baby will smile for no reason—they're just gassy, not that I'm saying Ponytail is just gassy). I don't think wordless vocalizing (whether it's Hopelandic mewling or primal screaming) necessarily makes things more pure or raw or whatever, but it seems to work pretty well for Ponytail. The band played a version of ESG's "You Make No Sense" (ha!), featuring some of the only comprehensible lyrics of the night, before launching into their relative hit, "Celebrate The Body Electric (It Came From An Angel)." Listening to the band on record—or half-seeing them at SXSW—it was easy to dismiss Ponytail as just some OOIOO goes to Baltimore claptrap; seeing them perform Saturday night at the Vera Project, it was pretty impossible to resist their ebullient energy. (Delirious happiness as punk/hardcore show; unbridled joy as resistance/rebellion—weird, good times for the kids these days, I guess, but whatever happened to hating yourself and wanting to die?)