Off Contact premiers ‘Can You?’ live with Glue, Original Star Band, & Cat Mouth at ICON
DADA/ICON | Sioux Falls, South Dakota | August 1, 2026
There was a wedding reception happening next door at DADA, which meant downtown Sioux Falls had produced one of those scenes nobody could have planned better. Guests in pressed shirts, dresses and polished shoes moved through the building while, only a room away, the local music crowd gathered in black denim, band shirts and various shades of artsy grunge. Each doorway seemed to open into a different Saturday night.
That contrast is part of what makes ICON such a gem of a venue. It can hold several versions of Sioux Falls at once without sanding any of them down. Wedding photos in one room. Loud guitars in another. Somewhere between the two, a person dressed for one occasion inevitably realizes they have wandered into the other.
The occasion was Off Contact’s “Can You?” record-release show, with Cat Mouth, Original Star Band and Sioux City’s Glue filling out a bill that kept changing shape. No two sets approached the room from the same direction. The night moved from bug punk abrasion to country-tinted storytelling, then into theatrical rhythmic disorder before Off Contact gathered the loose pieces into something softer, stranger and built for movement.
No wasted time
Cat Mouth opened the night at 8 p.m. with their first live performance as a band, exactly when the flyer said the music would begin. Myles settled behind the drums, Gregg took the bass, Sion handled guitar and Jon Michael stepped forward on vocals. The first blast arrived before the room had time to second-guess whether the night was truly underway.
The band describes its music as bug punk, a name that suits both its nervous movement and its refusal to make itself comfortable. The songs came on loud and directly, driven by long, drawn-out vocals that stayed moody even as the instruments pushed harder underneath them.
Jon Michael did not simply sing toward the audience. He bent into phrases, pulled away from the microphone and struck poses that made the physical act of performing feel inseparable from the music.
There were familiar faces in the lineup for anyone who has spent time around Sad Eye Pearl or the Full Circle Book Co-op music community, but Cat Mouth did not feel like a side project assembled from recognizable parts.
Compared with the more measured character associated with some of those other connections, this band was more confrontational. The songs pressed forward instead of waiting to be approached.
At moments, the enthusiasm became almost too much for the equipment. Feedback tore through the mix more than once, thin and piercing enough to make shoulders rise around the room. Cat Mouth never lost its composure. Nobody froze or stared helplessly toward the sound booth. The band stayed inside the performance and let the noise become part of the damage.
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The room changes clothes
Original Star Band walked into the space Cat Mouth had just left and changed nearly every assumption the opening set had established.
The five-member arrangement created more room within the music. Troy Manning handled guitar and vocals, Cain Rotert added a second guitar, Jacob Vande Vegte played drums, Jenson Twite held down the bass and Dan Nissen worked the keys. After Cat Mouth’s compressed force, the additional instrumentation felt expansive.
Manning’s voice carried a country twang, but the band never stayed inside a clean country outline. Folk textures appeared, then gave way to blues-shaped guitar solos that added depth without turning the songs into showcases for technique. Rotert’s guitar work often functioned as an extra voice beside Manning rather than merely reinforcing the same chords.
Nissen’s keys helped keep the arrangement from becoming too dry or traditional. Notes appeared around the edges, softening some passages and thickening others, while Twite and Vande Vegte gave the songs enough movement to keep the set from settling into a front-porch sway.
Original Star Band moved between an alternative looseness and a more visibly country posture. The interesting part was not choosing which description fit best. It was hearing how naturally the band stepped between them. A song could begin with the directness of a folk story, pick up momentum through the rhythm section and suddenly open into a blues guitar passage without sounding like three different groups negotiating for space.
The set carried an upbeat quality without becoming lightweight. Storytelling remained central, but the stories moved rather than sitting still for inspection. Manning delivered them with enough personality that even listeners unfamiliar with the material could follow the changes in mood.
Time behaved strangely during their performance. Cat Mouth had made every minute feel sharp and immediate. Original Star Band made the set seem to pass within a blink. That was not because the material lacked distinction. The opposite was true. The arrangements kept introducing small changes before any one texture could wear out its welcome.
By the time the final song ended, the room had shifted from bracing itself against Cat Mouth’s attack to moving more freely. The formal clothes passing in the hallway outside no longer seemed quite so distant. Original Star Band had pulled the concert closer to the wedding for a moment, not by becoming polished or restrained, but by giving the room music people could sway to without asking permission first.
Glue brings the strange
Glue began by introducing themselves.
It was a small simple gesture, but one too many bands forget. David Hansen identified the group before settling into bass and vocals, with Aaron Chedester on guitar and Demetrius Dominick behind the drums. The audience did not have to wait until the end of the set, search the flyer or quietly ask somebody nearby who they were watching.
Then the courtesy ended and the chaos started.
Glue’s songs often rode on a steady, compulsive pulse. Dominick’s drumming created something close to a heartbeat, but not a resting one. This was the rhythm of a body that had realized something was wrong before the mind caught up. Eerie sounds hovered behind it, adding unease without overwhelming the trio’s physical attack.
Chedester’s guitar scraped through the repetition while Hansen used the bass to make the songs feel heavy without simply making them slow. The three players understood how to build disorder around a dependable center. Even when the music appeared ready to shake apart, the beat kept returning.
Their banter brought some air into the set, though Hansen’s performance remained intensely physical. He moved with the exaggeration of somebody refusing to let the stage become a place where musicians merely stand and reproduce recordings. Every motion carried a little extra drama. He leaned into the microphone, worked his body around the bass and treated transitions as opportunities rather than dead space.
At some point, apparently, cake entered the situation.
A restroom break pulled me out of the room for the exact moment, which is perhaps the least dignified way to miss the night’s strangest piece of stagecraft. By the time I returned, it appeared Hansen had thrown cake on himself. I cannot responsibly explain the motive, sequence or deeper symbolism. I can only report the aftermath and admit that Glue seemed like the band most likely to make cake feel less like a prop than an occupational hazard.
That uncertainty almost suited the performance. Glue did not offer a clean explanation for every sound or movement. The trio created a controlled mess, then allowed the audience to decide which parts were funny, threatening or simply strange.
Their set sat at the night’s most unstable point. Original Star Band had opened the room outward. Glue tightened it again, replacing twang and blues color with repetition, eerie atmosphere and a rhythm that refused to release its grip. The shift should have felt abrupt. Instead, it clarified what the full lineup was accomplishing. Variety was not an accidental byproduct of booking four bands. It was the evening’s central strength.
Can You?
This was my second time covering Off Contact, and the groove remained the first thing to register.
The band’s core lineup of Brogan Costa, Pat Nelson, Qarl Koyzer and Simon Keller approached the stage with a softer vocal presence than the groups that had come before them. Softer did not mean smaller. Koyzer’s voice stretched across the songs in long phrases while guitar and bass blended beneath him, revealing the chemistry of musicians who understand how much pressure to apply without crowding one another.
Their new album, “Can You?”, had been released the day before the show. Hearing the band present that material after three drastically different opening sets made the record-release performance feel less like an isolated headlining slot and more like the point where the night’s changing moods finally met.
Off Contact can be groovy without becoming carefree. The rhythm invites movement, but the sounds around it retain a slight haze. Guitar lines do not always announce where they are headed. Bass remains melodic enough to pull attention away from the obvious focal points. The drums provide shape while leaving room for the songs to stretch.
Koyzer’s vocal approach brought an unexpected pop softness into that mix. At moments, his melodies carried a faint Savage Garden quality, not because Off Contact suddenly sounded like late-1990s radio pop, but because his phrasing favored smoothness and sustained notes where another post-punk vocalist might have chosen detachment or barked repetition.
He also manipulated his voice throughout the set, changing its texture and adding depth rather than singing every passage with the same tone. Those choices gave the performance more variety and kept the softer delivery from becoming passive.
A fifth musician, Jay, joined the band on saxophone, introducing another color without making the arrangement feel crowded. The instrument gave the music a sharper flash of personality and made the set feel slightly less predictable. Off Contact already operates between categories, and the saxophone pushed the songs farther away from easy classification.
The band’s official descriptions reach toward post-punk, shoegaze, psychedelia and Madchester grooves, but the live performance was more convincing than a stack of genre terms. The evidence was in how the songs moved. Bass and drums created a body-level pull. Guitar supplied atmosphere and tension. The vocals floated above that foundation without losing contact with it.
Then Koyzer began dancing with the microphone stand.
It could have been a small gesture. Instead, he turned the stand into a partner, guiding it across the stage before lifting it overhead like a trophy. The moment had enough confidence to avoid looking self-conscious. It was dramatic because he committed to it fully, not because the production demanded a grand pose.
That image stayed with me. After watching Cat Mouth throw themselves into bug punk theatrics, Original Star Band slide between folk, blues and country, and Glue turn rhythmic anxiety into something involving cake, Off Contact ended the night by raising the microphone stand as though the act of making music deserved its own victory ceremony.
Maybe it did.
Afterglow
When the show ended, the divide inside ICON returned to focus. Wedding guests were still dressed for photographs and slow dances. The concert crowd carried the warmth and ringing ears of four sets that had refused to resemble one another.
The building had held both nights without asking either one to quiet down.
That was the real beauty of the evening. Cat Mouth arrived on time and bit into the room. Original Star Band loosened it with twang, keys and stories. Glue rebuilt it around an anxious pulse, theatrical motion and one unexplained dessert incident. Off Contact closed by letting softer vocals ride across deep grooves, blended guitars, saxophone and the confidence of a band presenting new work on its own terms.
Outside, those different crowds would eventually return to the same downtown sidewalks. Dress shoes and battered boots. Wedding songs and bug punk. A microphone carried overhead like proof that, for a few hours, the strange room next door had won something.
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