Title Fight

Title Fight

Title Fight’s success has been built up incrementally since high school — where, full disclosure, I knew the band’s bassist and drummer, Ned and Ben Russin — growing steadily but always shored up by a fervently devoted fanbase. It’s something I’d only ever witnessed on general home turf in the Northeast, but apparently it follows them to L.A., too, where people crammed up against the rails in the brightness of just-about-to-wane evening, thrashing along to the band’s more muscular, aggressive take on the more spaced-out material from this year’s Hyperview. Even “Head In The Ceiling Fan” — the bleary standout from 2012’s Floral Green, a track that approximates some lo-fi vision of dream-pop — was more cacophonous, more heavily droning than its studio counterpart. The set paired well after Spiritualized — one the spacy, washing-back-ashore re-entry to FYF Day 2, the next the gut-punch wake-up call. It’s still totally surreal and special for me to see these guys do this at this level, a continent’s length away from where we grew up.