Elvis Depressedly played Great Scott – 11/29

I’m way behind on blogging because, despite my early predictions, December did not turn out to be a slow month. Anyway, here’s an orphaned photo set from a Sunday night show at the end of November with bummer North Carolina indie pop band Elvis Depressedly (fronted by Mat Cothran of Coma Cinema) and locals Brittle Brian and Cooper Knights. 

I had only a word-of-mouth familiarity with this bill but opted to check it out on a whim anyway, since on a free Sunday night I might as well drink Narragansetts at Great Scott while I take pictures and hear bands rather than drinking them alone at home while I zone out to X-Files reruns. Elvis Depressedly brought the fatalist mid-tempo jams and the best band name, while both solo singer/songwriter openers played strong, charming sets. There were flashes of John Darnielle and Dean Wareham in Cooper Knights’ delivery and turns of phrase, and Brittle Brian offered a particularly lovely song about not trusting Daniel Johnston.

Photo-wise, I decided to use this show as an opportunity to try out a lens I’d been meaning to experiment with at shows. It’s a Minolta Rokkor 135mm f/2.8 prime – a handsome-looking, all-manual hunk of metal and glass manufactured somewhere in the vicinity of the late 1960s/early 1970s. I have my grandfather’s old Minolta SRT-101 kit and do shoot with it occasionally, but generally I don’t have much use for its lenses in a digital context. Beyond the obvious lack of autofocus, they’re only usable on Canon bodies with an adaptor that includes extra glass due to spacing. These cost you a stop of light and lower your image quality. Glassless adaptors exist, but most lenses won’t focus anywhere near infinity with them; good for making a 50mm into a macro, not good for much of anything else. In the case of this particular lens, though, I did wonder whether the 135mm focal length would counteract the infinity focus problem to any degree. As it turns out, in a venue like Great Scott where it isn’t weird to be shooting 3 feet from your subject, the 135 is actually pretty usable with a glassless adaptor. It’s not the sharpest lens in the world, and obviously manual focusing in the dark is a tad challenging, but I wound up pretty happy with some the dreamy extreme closeups I was able to get with it. I foresee it becoming a frequent companion at more intimate venues next year.