If anybody can fill Wrigleyville with chill vibes, it’s Kenny Vasoli. The Chicago neighborhood (which is normally filled with drunken bros, fistfights and vomit) was as good a place to be as any tropical paradise on Tuesday when Vacationer hit the stage. Led by Vasoli who was rocking a muscle tee, a Philly’s hat and an absolutely gorgeous head of hair (which, to the delight of everybody in the audience, got a good whip back and forth on the last song), the band grooved out to their hits “The Wild Life,” “Paradise Waiting,” and of course the love song dedicated to Vasoli’s puppy, “Good as New.” And I don’t use the word “grooved” lightly. As Vasoli said in his interview with Panic, he likes to see the crowd dancing, and he was leading by example. Doing a full body wiggle/pulsation, Vasoli told the crowd “our job is to warm you guys up for the St. Lucia dance party. If you go from a stand still to the kind of dancing you’ll be doing in a minute, you’re going to pull something and then you’ll have to eat a lot of bananas tomorrow. We’re just helping you guys out.”
Even with that stellar warm up, there might still have been a couple of people nursing sore muscles the next day – St. Lucia, as always, brought the dance party. Backed by two elevated drummers with see-through drum kits, Grobler got the crowd bouncing with “We Got it Wrong” (on which the crowd supplied the backing “don’t go, don’t go away!” chorus) “September” “Wait for Love” and of course “Elevate” off the debut album. While Vasoli was a wiggler/groover, Grobler was more of a bouncer/jumper, at one point doing a picture perfect jump off the elevated drum stands that gave the crowd a fantastic view of the zebra print shoes he was sporting to match his button up zebra print shirt.
It takes a lot to make Wrigleyville the place to be on a Tuesday night, but Vacationer and St. Lucia have what it takes in spades – you could not have paid anybody in that audience to be anywhere else.