Kurt Vile was good to Dallas at his Longhorn Ballroom show

If Neil Young is the dust by which God made modern rock music, then Kurt Vile is the rib he’ll use to make the next generation. Vile and his band, the Violators, are leading the charge for a few psych-rock purists, honoring the ethos and energy of the genre’s pioneers. Vile’s show at the Longhorn Ballroom on Wednesday night was a mellow display of his hallmarks: stoic delivery backed by intricately layered strings. 

“We’re the blue-collar Neil Young and Crazy Horse,” Vile said to the Observer when we caught up with him ahead of the show. “I really like to think we fill this niche, that we fill this void that is true to traditional rock ‘n’ roll.” 

Vile’s sound, identifiable within seconds, is uniquely his – a monotonous prose that comes from the very back of his throat as if it’s crawled from his heart, and a unique playing style marked by a fingerpicking technique he picked up playing the banjo and translated to a six-string. It’s raw and irreplaceable, try as they might. 

“I think I broke new ground as I feel like I always do,” he said. “I have been exploring this sort of hypnotic psychedelic thing that’s just mine, you know?”

Touring his 10th album, “Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me,”  his show was a séance, calling on his psych forefathers.

“[This album] is epic, but this one turned into a little bit more of a mellow epic, psychedelic,” Vile told us. “This is psychedelic and pretty.” 

And it was. 

Vile, whose camp must travel with a conservative estimate of more than a dozen guitars, plays for a diverse audience who have found his music at any point in the last 20 years and stayed to watch the artist metamorphose. But he’s never fully departed from his origins. 

“The record would be a little more mellow if we didn’t have weird but catchy infectious psychedelic rockers, which [are] more or less just chorus earworms over and over,” he said when we spoke with him. “In between, it’s just all kinds of psychedelic hijinks and rock ‘n’ roll throwback hijinks.” 

Vile, who confessionally loves Dallas, particularly his former openers, Dallas-based band True Widow, last played the Kessler Theatre, and the smaller venue quickly sold out. 

“Dallas is special to me,” he said to the Observer.

Upgrading to the Longhorn Ballroom presented technical issues on Wednesday night, though, as the venue’s sound system crashed for the opener, Being Dead, a well-worth-it band from Austin. 

The band played two songs before realizing no one could hear them, and after 45 minutes of unexplained silence, they were allowed to play one acoustic song before wrapping up.

“There’s one lesson I’ve learned: something is better than nothing,” said Being Dead’s frontwoman, Falcon Bitch, on Wednesday. The artist legally changed her name and made a selection we couldn’t help but write about. 

An apology from the venue would have been nice, but then again, we may not have even heard it. The malfunction was a great disservice to the fans who bought tickets specifically for the growing band, and a greater disservice to the newly minted fans they would have gained. 

With technical issues in the rearview, Vile took the stage, giving flowers to his openers. Running through the playful and anecdotal “Zoom 97,” before playing the grimier and soulful “99 BPM.” The Violators abandoned their leader centerstage, with just an acoustic guitar, to cover John Prine’s “How Lucky.” In stunning moments like these, Vile reveals his greatest attribute as a musician: his unrelenting joy of being a fan. 

He finished the show with his classics, “Pretty Pimpin’,” and all 10 minutes of “Walkin’ On a Pretty Day,” the latter half of which displays Vile and his band at their absolute best and most psychedelic. With abundant thanks, Vile and his band left the stage. 

To their credit, there’s not a seat in the Longhorn Ballroom where the sound systems, when they work, falter for even a second, allowing for Vile and his backing bandmates’ hypnotic skills to surround the room, creating a sonic trip without the assistance of hallucinogens. 

After an extremely short wait, which was a wise choice considering most of the audience had likely already had its patience exercised to the limits, Vile and his -olators returned to play a three-song encore. For “Bassackwards,” Vile surprised the uninitiated, flexing his trumpet chops, a skill he’s been building since childhood, before returning to his claim to fame, the strings. 

If his latest show in Dallas proved anything, it’s that Vile is the patron saint of modern psych rock, awaiting canonization.