Venue Type: Live Music
I won’t travel to Brooklyn for my own shows, but for some reason I will let Hipster Jr. Jr. sucker me into it. This time for yet another K-pop show for a group, UAU, that apparently has like one EP and maybe some singles. Which itself is a subunit of another K-pop group I’ve been dragged to see called Dreamcatcher. Needless to say, as a Gen-X adult male, I stick out. But not as much as you’d hope. Granted, the audiences at these shows are generally much younger, more female, more gay and more ethnically ambiguous than I am. Definitely the most diverse audiences I’ve seen at a shows. Not a big stretch when you’re going to see mostly long-running, legacy or white-guy indie rock bands. The two drunk, older bald dudes with homemade t-shirts that said something about “Bald Dudes for Jiu,” which I’m told is a member of UAU and Dreamcatcher, not withstanding. Creepy as fuck.
While this show was… sparsely attended, I imagine a lot of the shows here are packed with fans of whatever is going on. The location of the venue is in some neighborhood called East Williamsburg. Which is apparently the ugly, industrial cousin of Williamsburg. No, seriously, it’s like a warehouse district with a bunch of autobody joints and sidewalks that are apparently fine to park half your car on. There isn’t a whole lot in the immediate area to do — drinking or eating-wise — but I suppose the treacherous drive there wasn’t too bad considering there were places to leave our car that didn’t seem like we would come back to a very pricey ticket. Or a carcass. The venue itself doesn’t have its own parking, but there are spots in the surrounding area if you make a few passes. I had pinpointed a pizza joint a little walk away, but Hipster Jr. Jr. saw the McDonald’s on the way and decided those McNuggets were hers. Brooklyn nuggets doesn’t quite have the ring to it that Brooklyn pizza does.
From the outside the venue looks like exactly what it probably always was: a nondescript warehouse. Inside it feels a bit like a movie set that was built inside that aforementioned warehouse. Like if you rolled up on the Paramount lot and entered the “concert venue” stage. All high ceilings, black paint and weathered metal. With just enough industrial touches to make it feel like at some point this was a working steel manufacturing plant. Which I guess it was, though the little nods feel more like one of the Batman rides at Six Flags than they do an authentic, decommissioned spark factory. That said, it’s pretty cool. A big box of a building that lacks any of the fancy nooks and crannies of the theaters, the weird stairs and crevices of the cramped NYC venues and some of the accoustics-destroying and sightline challenges of some places in the city. It’s still not a great place if you’re short, as the standing-room-only floor space is deep and the stage not particularly wide. Granted I had a bunch of short, slight men and women in front of me and the audience was only about ten people deep, so I was good. Hipster Jr. Jr. tops out at 5’2″ and she could see from our vantage point at the back of the “crowd,” but, honestly, the whole thing was like watching a performance in a high school gym there were so few people.
Overall the sound wasn’t bad, although the K-pop genre is mostly canned music played through a PA system, so it probably wasn’t the best test. The hard surfaces, open, industrial metal and piping doesn’t generally make for the best sound dynamics, but perhaps they’ve engineered it in some special way. The wiki description makes it sound like they modeled it in some way on Terminal 5, which makes sense given the footprint. But that is not a venue you’d want to compare yourself with. That place is an echoey cave of despair. I do feel like the placement of the giant rusty, iron soundboard area sitting right in the middle of the floor is a little odd and would be annoying to have to stand around or behind, but perhaps I’m misjudging. Otherwise there were a couple bars, at least, that were completely empty (the K-pop crowd not exactly known for pounding beers) and most of the staff almost looked like they wanted something to do. They turned out to be very nice folks, the people who worked there, as I chatted with a couple of them as I waited for Hipster Jr. Jr. to take some sort of cutesy photo with one of the group members. All in all, it was a super-positive adventure, but I’d love to come back again when I can put my music to the test. Guitars, drums and bass. Let’s do it. East Williamsburg!
319 Frost St. – East Williamsburg
888/929-7849
bowerypresents.com/venues/brooklyn-steel
