Stars of the Lid kills the EchoPlex. Slowly.

"It's so beautiful," a beaming young girl clad in the requisite librarian chic said to the fellow manning the Stars of the Lid merch table. "I don't even know what it is, but isn't it beautiful?"

Turns out she was referring to one of the band's artfully designed tour shirts, but the same could be said for what was pouring from the speakers at the EchoPlex as Stars of the Lid (augmented by a three-piece string section) unfurled tracks from their glacially paced 2007 album, "And Their Refinement of the Decline," to an attentive and exceptionally slow-moving Echo Park crowd. Describing what the band sounds like to the uninitiated is a confounding proposition, one that inevitably results in some absurd mashing together of genre code words (symphonic-ambient-drone core, for starters) rather than doing real justice to what the band creates.

Because as beautiful as Monday's show certainly was in occupying some lush territory between the indie and orchestral worlds, inevitably there's a subtext to what you're saying when attending one of their shows or -- even more boldly -- praising one of their vaguely inscrutable albums bearing titles like "Avec Laudenum" and "The Ballasted Orchestra." With only subtle shifts in tone often differentiating one song from the next and little regard for nuisances like familiar song structure, melody and rhythm, it's easy to suspect that Stars of the Lid and, in turn, their fans are essentially saying, "I no longer have any use for what is commonly called 'pop music.' Yes, I am comfortable with this. Could you please turn up the sound of the wind?"

But there is something to this music for nearly every ear. Lush, classical-adjacent compositions swell, retreat and reverberate, creating something very evocative, if utterly impossible to dance to. When the sun finally explodes and the last three seconds of your life are unfolding in slow motion before your eyes, the sound you'll hear -- if you're lucky -- will most resemble Stars of the Lid. Stationed at opposite ends of the stage as psychedelic projections swirled behind them, Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie -- the two principal members of SOTL -- plucked at guitars and fiddled with two tables-worth of keyboards, pedals and gadgets, but apart from the ebb and flow of the string section there was little way to discern who was playing what. Guitars sounded like cellos. Keyboards swelled like guitars. Cellos sighed like weary breathing. And so on. The most recognizable sound was that of Echo Park itself, "sitting in" with the band as a radio station broadcasting from one of the nearby hillside transmitters murmured commercial hip-hop through the many silent moments in the night's performance -- a little found-sound quirk that the band may have appreciated.

Lovely as the evening was, it was undeniably hard to take if you weren't lucky enough to claim one of the several dozen folding chairs at the front of the stage. This was really a show that would've been better off at REDCAT or Barnsdall Gallery. Some of the audience left standing in the back started trickling out as Stars of the Lid closed their set with the best song title in their catalog (hint: it's near the end of Disc 2). Still, Monday's show was undeniably affecting as a whole, if only to confirm that Stars of the Lid's lovely, undulating compositions are created and performed by actual humans, not some benevolent intergalactic amoeba floating somewhere in deep space. With one of its members residing in Belgium and the other teaching debate at USC, there's no telling how many more tours like this are ahead. But we're better for having Stars of the Lid in our orbit.

-- Photo and post by Chris Barton