Toad’s Place, the legendary concert club on New Haven’s York Street, has been a name dangling over my head for years. I have been well aware of its reputation as a venue that has staged shows from artists as small as the show I saw recently, featuring Crumb on Sept. 5, to huge acts like U2 (years before their tremendous ascension), and cult acts like Mr. Bungle.

I finally got to attend a concert at the venue for the first time to see Crumb, an excellent inaugural experience that was also my first proper psychedelic show.

Formed in Boston, Crumb is cut from the same cloth as many of today’s neo-psychedelic acts. Whether they be the most prominent in today’s world, like Australia’s Tame Impala or King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard or France’s Melody’s Echo Chamber, or Moon Duo from San Francisco (naturally), these are groups that have all been either inspired by one another or that have collaborated with one another on a sound that recontextualizes the golden age of psychedelic rock and pop in late 1960s. These are bands that prefer the Beatles’ quirky and often heady brand of psych-pop, best demonstrated on Magical Mystery Tour and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, combining those sounds with others to create their own unique take on acid-induced rock.

While Tame Impala has grown increasingly more ambient and dance-oriented to become the perfect fit for sub-headliners for music festivals in this age, and King Gizzard is the ultimate trippy garage act-plundering styles like boogie rock, thrash metal, and old-school punk rock-bands like Crumb have claimed bedroom pop and electropop as their territories.

To the point, the show was spectacular and contained all the elements a great psych show (at least in my mind, even as a novice for attendance) should have: a light show spanning the color spectrum, smoke, ambiance, great display of dynamics, and musicians who barely move onstage before a crowd who look arguably more enthusiastic. Cascading over all of this is Lila Ramani’s voice.

In a pop world now dominated by female voices that whisper emotively like Lana Del Rey rather than belt ostentatiously like any pop star or American Idol contestant of the noughties, Ramani’s voice is no more unique than that of Billie Eilish or Melody Prochet. But like those singers, what it does is complement her music perfectly.

Similar to Prochet, Ramani seems to prefer a shoegaze-inspired form of singing that predates the current vocal climate by over 30 years and serves as an added layer of texture more than anything else. Given the hazy atmosphere of the band’s music, her voice is the right instrument to outpour even more fog since the lyrics, even if intelligible, don’t seem to matter that much.

What does matter above all else for psychedelic music is that the sound of a band comes through as clear as it can, and for that, audio technicians with great talent themselves are a necessity. Crumb definitely had that quality on Sept. 5, so next to the band itself, I’d like to give a shout-out to their engineers for configuring one of the best-sounding shows I have seen, tying together what a great introductory night to Toad’s it was for me and surely some of the people around me.

Find out more about upcoming shows at Toad’s at www.toadsplace.com.