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Week Three of the Scamper Abbey residency, and I arrive while Spiraling are playing. Their frontman sings and play keyboards, and they seem to be working the territory where Elton John's more rocking material overlaps the twee end of The Who's catalogue. It's kind of charming, and I'm kind of charmed. The lyrics, when I can make them out, also seem interesting; the song I come in for revolves around the line "I'm sorry you're crazy," and boy howdy, haven't we all been there. One song is a bit gutsier in overall sound, with the guitar, bass, and keyboards all playing the same line in octaves for a surprisingly powerful effect. Amazingly, they offer to stop before their time is up, then play another song when the soundman tells them they still have time. It's a good one, too, and very well-received.
Since Scamper have five weeks of residency to fill up, they're calling tonight their Throwback Night and pulling out some oldies (er, late '90s oldies) that they don't really play anymore. The plus of this is that it's fun to hear these rarities, some of which I vaguely recognize from having first seen them a couple of years ago. They open with an older intro to "Longshot," for example. But the older songs don't have quite the lapidary polish of the material they're now focused on; there's presumably a reason that they focus on it. And the older material winds up meaning that Nate sings more, which wouldn't be a problem at all if he weren't hopped up on cold medicine, with his throat audibly fucked up. Actually, come to think of it, his throat was audibly fucked up the first time I ever saw them, so there's some nostalgia value there, too. Brendan is on a tear tonight; he develops a running gag about injecting heroin into his cock, which maybe isn't so much a gag as just the phrase "injecting heroin into my cock," but he works it, and eventually Keith displays a fabulous deadpan as he gently pulls Brendan away from the mic to continue the set.
The Nonfamous can't really throw back to anything, since they're a pretty new band and this is only their second show with this lineup. Now that I see them with Bill Trevaskis on guitar, the thing that strikes me most about them is that Ryan Lee looks about eight feet tall in this band. Initially Bill seems to be the lead guitarist to Ryan's rhythm, and I wonder if we have to give up Ryan's fiercely odd leads to get Bill, but they do switch off, and some later songs have the lead-and-noise configuration that Bill was working with Matt in Anti-Love Project. I like that. Ryan's weirdly high, powerful voice goes very well, if weirdly, with Courtney's soaring harmonies. Without ever sounding like regular pop songs, these tunes nevertheless manage to stick with me.
