Worcestor is the second largest city in New England. Its sister cities are Worcestor, England; Piraeus, Greece; Pushkin, Russia; Afula, Israel; and, depending on who you talk to, Detroit, MI. I've gotten to pop through the city on a bike passing by and a bandmate working. More thoughts on Speaker for the Dead later, but mainly I've been introduced to a complicated music scene with a young generation on the rise. I felt at times, half naked, sweaty, painted and hoarse, like I was one of the cool kids I always wanted to be at shows, but the devotion to the local scene is worth much more than anybody's delusions. These were two shows, overlapping somewhat, at 97D on Webster and and the Firehouse.
Locria
I'd heard of them through Zack Shaw, a wonderful songwriter, guitarist and tourmate, this being work very different from the pop-punk overtones of The Hotel Year. Mainly I was enthralled by the interplay between the guitars, and how smooth and neither-boring-nor-predictable the breakdowns were. The jamming/proggy bits didn't hit me as much as the tighter songs, but then again, the bassist didn't know the last song very well and did a fantastic job working it all out.
Little War Twins
Hadn't heard of them, though I missed their sharing the stage with The Furies and Bright, the Morning, two wonderful area bands. A 5(ish) piece act fronted by an acoustic guitarist, flanked by a violinist and an electric guitarist often with slide in hand. The result was a set of flexible textures, most remarkable for its ability to swandive gracefully into hard fucking breakdowns and pop back out again. Although I'm not sure how their synergy was as a band, they were certainly tight, and each had powerful and well-understood roles within the band, with a kind of love-infused proclamation riding the lyrics. Kind of like their friends and tourmates Fifth Nation, their spiritual bent isn't my thing, but it clearly provides a center for a rock-solid band.
SFTD - we. kicked. ass.
//
STYK + ACLU Benefit
Missed the set to arrive there and get into the nitty-gritty about personal safety and community responsibility within these music venues, and within the scene as a whole. Apologies! As for ACLU Benefit, the Stephen Merritt comparisons are justified.
Perfumeman
Got really pumped for these two from their rig: drum sequencer, floor tom, mics, cello with looping pedal setup. It was a beautifully flexible set, jumping between beat driven fatalist pop and queer ditties without disturbing. The fog and lasers were not too distracting, there were some but not-enough embracings of musical anarchy, too much flirting, I was more focused on the looping rig. A touring band doing the good work from Denver, moving some butts with a tight aesthetic, good luck to them.
Math the Band
A famous band never heard of, chiptune dance pop gods in their own right, two hard rocking musicians with a good sense of theatrics and a great sense of beat. They were apparently worried about SFTD stealing their Thunder, on a Wednesday night after a recent Andrew W.K. tour in a cooler venue. Despite all the intersections of hype and expectation, they wiped everything clean with their dextrous but often-still-free-to-mess-with-people hands. Perhaps not a permanent butt-moving experience of a night, but only as many butts as you feel need to rocked at the moment.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
Centipede Hz: Stream of Consciousness
Moonjock: pulse like you mean it, pulse like we don’t know what meter is, lay the vocals across it like it’s the easiest thing. we know when the radio set’s ended. it’s disappointing to lose the bass and drop into 4/4, building the energy back together to jump around like you’re someone flipping the volume on the radio in rhythm. I don’t feel what you’re developing but when the bass dives back I wonder if maybe the crescendos will blow out my ears with headphones. at the very least you’ve made a music of density and lack thereof. the album rises from the synthy muck just as much as from the list of influences.
Today's Supernatural: chick choom. the kind of energy it takes to drop the beat away on your “lelelelelelet”s is the same it takes to drive the arpeggios together. MPP never really gave up on its sense on silence. It’s not that you haven’t been this tight before, but you’re not just pushing the tempos up, you’re dancing more clearly in front of the eye. I feel like you trust me more, undistorted and playing on regular beats with handclaps. It’s not about pop, trying to genrify into that is either a tautology or useless. you’re straying too far from your hook and that’s part of your game, to spread us out and make us feel lost even while we know that the rhythm is something almost too familiar to the radio. nice accelerating part; rhythm is still in your control, your god to toy me with.
Rosie Oh: and you start a third groove and it’s corrupted from the start, and the halo of noise becomes more interesting and worthwhile as the passenger’s more worth it than the car. you’re opposing what your bass is plucking out and its rocky progressions and drifting into them when you feel, riding the synths back in and out. this is music of attention, attention is the manipulated factor, the pitch and timbre are a harmonic language that-
Applesauce: oh this one’s pretty. nice use of “lil honey” to draw intensity from what was just a little push. in some ways this sounds like their first record with the tempos up and synths up, is that the same bass tone? this song I could get into forever, progressing from part to part holding my hand a lot more than the earlier ones. I’m not quite bored yet, I wonder if the word for what you’re doing in spinning out these parts is in “progressive” or in “epic” (as in, the theater, and Of Montreal’s fortspinnung) or in “collage” since the parts don’t quite fit together in a really refreshing way, like there’s a bit of modulation to get from one instrumentation and chord progression to another, a certain amount of potential energy to overcome. a lot of these songs repeat themselves a lot! goodness guys I can’t hear the differences between the repeats on these speakers. the song winds down to counting and four-on-the-floor with the 12/8 you hint at flitting about like a ghost.
Wide Eyed: wispy whispery. a contained rocket-arpeggio, an engine. you use tricks like this to hide the quicker pulses, like there’s some 14-year old drum student tapping out double-tap rolls behind each song that you phase in and out or something. not literally. nice use of the bass to alter and compress the groove. these songs could go so many more places, at the same time! they could lose some of their structural redundancy and each generate enough material (pleasant motivic redundancy, Mozart!) to kick around for 8-9 minutes. who’s singing? this song paces about in its pen for a bit and then never really gets out, brings you down into it kinda.
Father Time: starting without mama bass! you oh my good just insert yourself where needed. you’re clearly working with the same materials in all of these songs, using idioms that blink briefly into the most intense beat you’ve ever heard and dropping itself back into a stable home for what a “song” should be.
New Town Burnout: up and down, up an down, up a down. the rhythm’s only the most stressed and tentative of glues, the road and the empty space, slowly populated by motion and by sync with the rising density of the vocals. this is fun, this is fun, this is easy too. when you drop it all out like that, though, it’s not as exciting, it’s built into us and we never really lose it, it doesn’t have the same tension as your “leleles.”
Monkey Riches: Please get into some glitch here PLEASE it would make my day, I want it to come! I don’t want every facet of how you can mix things together and turn your face away from the massive cathedral-in-process-of-collapsing house of rhythm that this could be. once you get used to this, there’s no drama I can hear…am I asking the wrong things? you get to a great place at the end of that one!
Mercury Man: oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh that that that that that that “sounds like she’s talking to me on the phone” I’m in love with the groundwork for this one, if this is what your formulas can do then I do not mind, I can not mind the crown this jewel is in. kick stop! kick stop! woooooeoeoeo.
Pulleys: I don’t have much else on the rest of these. They invent themselves in clever ways that I can’t quite pinpoint right now, it sounds like the subtlties are worth diving into, I can’t quite hear what the currents of synths are doing to carry the sounds along. This feels like something very new in pop, something not in the 2k0s, hinted at in Radiohead and Sufjan’s last releases, something using a quieter language to make louder things, a decade of whirring and silence and loops.
Amanita: there was another song! it was fine.
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