Music in a void

Broncho front man Ryan Lindsey played at the Vaudeville Mews last week.

The biggest mistake four-piece Broncho made in its set this past weekend was performing it in Des Moines on a weeknight. The difficulty in getting people to turn out for shows in the capital city on non-traditional bar nights is a subject that’s been covered previously in these very pages. But Sunday at the Mews was the closest I’ve come to watching a couple of bands play for one another, as the number of people in attendance who weren’t members of Broncho, opening act Foxholes or Mews staff totaled three.

However, if the small crowd had an effect at all on Broncho’s set, it was blissfully small. The Norman, Okla., pop punk outfit churned out a set that would have made Joey and Dee Dee proud. Front man Ryan Lindsey — bearing a resemblance to The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne — was an energetic dynamo as he and band mates Nathan Price, Ben King and Jonathan Ford hammered out a series of rapid fire, anthemic songs.

Sunday night wasn’t Broncho’s first trip through Iowa, and it’s sure not to be its last. The group is working on a new album, and if there is any justice in the world, it’ll see the light of day before spring. But, for now, the order of the day is this: live-wire shows in largely disinterested towns for tiny but enthusiastic pockets of people. It’s a situation that Lindsey, for one, seems to be OK with — or is at least able to wax philosophical about.

“I’d rather play in front of four people who are really into it than to 100 people who don’t really care,” he said after the show.

That’s one desire in which Des Moines was able to indulge him. CV