• Blush Photo
• Broadcast

The first disappointing thing was that no one was wearing a costume. Not in the audience—plenty of good get-ups there—but onstage. Sure, Broadcast and Atlas Sound were here on tour, and maybe it’s hard to get a costume together on the road, but c’mon. You’d think Bradford Cox would at least put on one of his old dresses or something. But no.

Cox wasn’t entirely without the holiday spirit, though. “Who’s got the best costume,” he asked between songs. “Tiger? You’re just wearing a striped shirt!” He spotted a girl dressed up as an apple with a worm poking out of it, asked her onstage, and awarded her free merch after the show for winning the first round of this impromptu costume contest. “That’s the best costume I’ve ever seen.”

Beyond the lack of costumes, it turns out that Atlas Sound and Broadcast—while certainly spooky—were kind of a bad match for Halloween. Both bands put on a fine show, but both were pretty subdued, making alternately formless or just mellow music. Even “Walkabout,” the poppiest, friendliest thing on the Atlas Sound’s recent Logos was played at a somnolent half-speed, despite the band’s occasionally energetic dual drummers, in what felt like an obvious missed opportunity to kick things up a bit. The whole set was kind of limp and noodly, and it all sounded like watching a band play in a fishtank (though not always in a bad way). The mood just didn’t seem to click with the relatively ramped-up, ready-to-party crowd.

Cox admitted as much with his winking between song banter. After the twangy, junkie cowboy number “Criminals,” Cox joked about switching things up “before we get too Austin City Limits…don’t think I don’t know.”

“Did you think this was gonna be spooky,” he asked. “Me too, but I can only be myself. I was born spooky, but I've recently become less spooky...shopping at The Gap, Whole Foods…next thing you know, they came and took away my fog machine and all my dresses. But there's one thing they can't take away from me”—and here, Cox paused to stomp on his delay pedal, so that the next word, “Dub!” echoed out appropriately. He kept riffing in a funny, fake dancehall patois as the band warmed up into the next song.

He asked the audience, “trick or treat,” and provided one of each: a rousing run through the morbidy but upbeat “Sheila” and a rendition of Broadcast’s “Teras in the Typing Pool” aided by that band’s Trish Keenan. Cox brought another costumer—a reveler in gothic bride drag—onstage for a round of applause, and then brought a guy with some kind of pan flute onstage to jam. He told a story about teaching Kim Deal how to replay one of her own songs, concluding, “We're gonna do cannonball by the Breeders now—I wish. Just more melancholy bullshit.” After which they actually played a winningly ascending jam before ending with the downer “Attic Lights.”

Broadcast burned through my good will for them with like 30 minutes of ambient noise and spooky sound effects, made slightly interesting by the strobing eyeball mandala projected on a video screen behind them and by the detachment of TK’s voice from her physical form by way of looping and delay (voices detached from forms = hauntology!). Still, when they finally kicked into the catchy, song-like “Corporeal,” with its drum machine snare crack, bass guitar and buzzing synths, the screen switching to saturated color for what looked like an endless zoom through a brain’s synaptic connections, I was spent. Hearing Truckasaurs echoing out of the Havana parking lot as I left made me think I may have missed the better Halloween party, huantology be damned.