Speedy Ortiz Cuts Through Thick Night Air at Death by Audio Sasha Maslov for The New York Times Speedy Ortiz In a concert at Death by Audio on Friday, the guitarist Matt Robidoux was borne aloft. There are indignities to being a small band playing a small show. Maybe the crowd will be small, too, or uninterested. The pay might be peanuts. Maybe you will be burdened by other circumstances beyond your control. The hand you're dealt is just that. Certainly no band is more powerful than the heat, as was clear Friday night at Death by Audio, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Speedy Ortiz was playing in celebration of the release of its full-length debut album, "Major Arcana" (Carpark). A sauna would have been preferable to this packed room, in which everything - the band's performance, the audience's enthusiasm - was hopelessly dampened. Speedy Ortiz, which hails from Western Massachusetts, played the album start to finish, despite "having never practiced that or done that," said Sadie Dupuis, the wry frontwoman, and the band's main engine. Ms. Dupuis, who's studying for a poetry M.F.A. at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, is a wordy, digressive lyricist, and a singer given to deadpan delivery. Behind her, the band echoes the slurry guitars, tonal abrasion and down atmosphere of early-to-mid-1990s indie rock like Helium or Polvo. All of its songs sound as if they're being accompanied by an arched eyebrow and a heavy sigh. Not much of that mood was communicated during this show, which was brief but slow moving. "People pay money to do this on a yoga mat or in a spa," Ms. Dupuis said, trying to make the best out of a moist situation. I guess you paid money, too. Like the album, which at its best is clever and cutting, the show picked up in the second half, when Ms. Dupuis began to slash through the heaviness of the room, and also climb above the rest of the band - Matt Robidoux on guitar, Darl Ferm on bass, Mike Falcone on drums - with a voice that could be savage, on "MKVI," or deceptively sweet, on "No Below," or tart, as on "Gary," which is the album's emotional highlight. That song includes some of Ms Dupuis's sharpest lyrics, aimed at someone who left her for someone far less interesting: I have seen the art of my stupid counterpart. The proportion's wrong. Every line unsure, The erased marks like a sore thumb swelling and cumbersome. You get the sense that Ms. Dupuis has far more to say than the dynamics of this band allow. What comes off as a purposeful tentativeness on the album here felt like disorganization, the words bubbling with ferocity and the arrangements scrambling just to keep up. As "MKVI," the album's final song, was winding down, Ms. Dupuis poked at Mr. Falcone's cymbals with the neck of her guitar, like a cat lazily pawing at a mouse toy. But before the band was even through with its final feedback squall, she'd slung a bag over her shoulder and stepped off the stage into the crowd. You couldn't even slightly blame her.