John Nolan makes the sentiments of his songs easily felt.

Nolan, lead singer of Straylight Run, dips his back inward while singing, his voice shifting from soft to visceral as he sinks down toward the end of the microphone before rising again, as if to bolster more emotional lift for his lyrics.

In Syracuse for the first time last night, Straylight Run played a brisk set to a receptive crowd at Schine Underground as part of University Union’s Bandersnatch Concert Series.

‘It was awesome,’ said Brianna Collins, a freshman communications design major. ‘It was really great.’

Nolan, his sister Michelle and Isaac Burker shifted places at the front of the stage like a Three-Card Monte table as the show went on, shuffling back and forth after nearly every song. After opening with a slightly awkward version of the band’s hit, ‘Existentialism of Prom Night,’ Straylight settled into a rhythm with the crowd bobbing along to older songs such as ‘Mistakes We Knew We Were Making’ and ‘It’s For the Best.’

Though the mid-tempo rhythm section of bassist, Shaun Cooper, and drummer, Will Noon, was generally solid, the crowd’s focus was at on the front of the stage.

A lithe brunette with a round face, Michelle Nolan played coy, delicately gripping the microphone and flicking her oval eyes innocently at the audience during ‘Tool Sheds and Hot Tubs.’ She gently rocked back and forth during other songs as she rotated from keyboard to guitar, the perfect girl for an emo band to break up over.

New songs from the band’s forthcoming album, ‘The Needles, The Space,’ set to be released this June, had a lighter bounce than its older material, substituting folk elements in the place of electronica on cuts like the jaunty ‘The Words We Say.’

‘It sounds promising,’ Collins said of the new material. ‘I’m definitely going to check it out.’

The February, made up of five SU students, opened the show. Though the crowd was generally respectful, the band struggled to stand out.

‘They were fun to dance to, but nothing I would really buy,’ said Margaret McGill, an undecided freshman in the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Lead singer, Brady Clark, looking like a poor man’s Bert McCracken with his shaggy hair and stubble, was all dramatic flair and posing with no pipes to back it up. The band often sagged under the weight of its flat acoustic attack, when the odd throb of Liz Pesnel’s stand-up bass wasn’t drowning them out completely.

‘I wasn’t too fond of them,’ said Brian Villacis, a freshman biology major. ‘I mean, I hadn’t heard of them before, but they were OK.’

Still, the night belonged to Nolan.

During the climax of first-set closer, ‘Hands in the Sky (Big Shot),’ his voice erupted, barking lyrics at the crowd while the band swelled around him, before imploding in a cacophony of keyboard atmospherics and feedback squalls. He returned to the stage alone for the encore, closing the show with ‘Your Name Here (Sunrise Highway).’

‘I was really impressed,’ Collins said.

Published on March 6, 2007 at 12:00 pm