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Based only on my knowledge of their Losing Blueprint labelmates, I expected Vaguely Starshaped to be thoroughly weird. As it turns out, they're sort of secretly weird. The pretty, chiming guitars, propulsive bass lines, and lovely, melodic vocals--my god, they sound a bit like XTC!--sort of lull you into a false sense of security, and then the rhythm will do something bizarre, or those pretty, chiming guitars will suddenly take on some totally fucked-up harmonic structure. It's a good balance, and keeps it interesting, although the guitars get a little too pretty and mellow for me from time to time.
I did not like Shark and Bear when I saw them before, (q.v. here and here) but they keep playing these great bills, so I keep seeing them. Good thing, too, as I like them much better tonight. They seem to have extended their grasp and retracted their reach just a bit; they're playing better, and many of these songs are just a little less ambitious, so that they can actually make them work. That's still awfully ambitious, so there's plenty of unusual odd-time rhythm and freakazoidal jagged guitar figures to feed my complexity jones. And they do still get beyond themselves a few times, but it's almost there, and I'm encouraged.
Eyes Like Knives probably aren't used to being the most normal band on a bill. (I mean, jeez, most of these songs are in 8!) There's a lot of Sonic Youth-y screaming guitar, and it's hard to hear male-female weird-harmony sung-shouted vocals without thinking of X. That's not a bad thing at all. There are also some very cool half-jumbled call and response interactions between the two singer/guitarists, both vocally and on guitar. I wish I could hear it better, but the bass is turned up awfully high. The drummer gives a feeling of playing at the edge of his considerable abilities, and runs down a bit at the end, but that's really just the last song.
Headlining are Constants In Breaking, whom I like more every time I see them. They do these sprawling, symphonic songs that benefit from repeated listening. Guitar and vocals are soft, ethereal things floating over the pounding, psychotic rhythm section. (That's the good kind of "psychotic.") The vocals are mixed way too low, and I would yell for more if they ever stopped playing for even a moment, but they segue more and less seamlessly from song to song for the whole set. (This only contributes to the overall impression of huge, complex compositions with many movements.) They play perhaps a half-dozen of these long songs and then stop rather suddenly, leaving me sadly encoreless but unable to really complain.
