Between Mando Diao’s set and its encore at the Bowery Ballroom on Monday night, the band members went backstage, shook up their beer bottles and returned to spray them across the stage and their closest fans. That was the kind of old-school boisterousness they also showed in their songs, which embrace 1960s garage-rock as if it might grow up to be punk.
Mando Diao, which is from Sweden, headlined what could have been called Retro Adrenaline Night: a triple bill of bands that have all decided that vintage styles survive best with a little infusion of speed. The Films, an American band with Anglophile leanings, opened with brash, smartly rhymed new-wave songs tinged with Elvis Costello’s corrosive wit and some of the swagger of Britpop. Pop Levi, an English rocker, favors psychedelic clothes and twisted 1970s memories; he mixed the stomp, high vocals and campy dance steps of glam-rock with blues-rock riffs and two-chord vamps, extending and bearing down on them until they became an ecstatic drone. (He also has a Prince-like funky side, but didn’t show it.)
After those bands, Mando Diao had to push hard, and it did. Its songs, which have lyrics in English, are disgruntled and frenetic. Often they are tales of crashed and burned romances or friendships, like the one in “The Wildfire”: “She said I hate you ’cause you breathe.” Another song from “Ochrasy” (Mute), Mando Diao’s new album, is “Killer Kaczynski” (named after the Unabomber), which tries to imagine a bomber’s mentality. “Ochrasy” itself, a rare slower song, also looks at the wider world: “I’m waking up again and see that war on screen again/And it makes me want to go and hide.” But most of the words go by in a rush of melodies and guitar lines. Mando Diao is exuberant yet craftsmanlike, making sure pop tunes emerge out of the hurtling music.
On “Ochrasy,” Mando Diao sometimes tries to sound relatively contemporary, hinting now and then at the Strokes. But onstage, it stayed with the vintage sound it loves — one that may be more exotic for a young band from Sweden than a band that could take American rock for granted. Its two guitarists and lead singers, Bjorn Dixgard and Gustaf Noren, traded off lead vocals and shared a few songs, switching between power-pop eagerness and garage-rock shouts.
Unlike some vintage-styled bands, Mando Diao sounds neither cautious nor hidebound; behind the singers, the band started out peppy and revved up through each song. The music insisted that with enough energy, old-fashioned songs can blast themselves into the here and now.
