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Säh are a three-piece from Michigan. One guy plays guitar (and occasionally vocalizes a bit) and one plays drums, while the third member plays second guitar (and sings a bit) on some songs, and plays second drum kit on others. The two-guitar songs are good—lots of rich texture in the guitar lines, and the drummer is fantastic—but the two-drummer songs are AMAZING! The way the two of them interact, with a lot of huge, heavy unison sections and then the main drummer going off and laying these incredibly fast, intricate fills over the top, reminds me a little bit of the sort of thing Concussion Ensemble did. It's not like they're capturing that, of course; there's only two of them. But they're almost the first band since CE broke up to even remind me of them. Also the music is much different. Where CE wrote straight up rock songs, these are expansive excursions, with many and various sections in each one, and a lot of stop-start and loud-soft dynamic shifts. In fact, their entire set is only four "songs," although each one contains multitudes.
Calumet-Hecla are next, and make great bill-mates for Säh: another three-piece with long, meandering songs that put the focus more on dynamics and instrumental flash than on vocals or melody. Here most of the flash is in the guitar, which is layered with loops and delay and more effects than I have ever seen anyone else use onstage. After the precision bludgeoning that we received from Säh, the rhythm section couldn't help but seem a little raw, but they're still damn good, and I particularly enjoy the bassist's strutting rock attitude; with the guitar player hemmed in by pedals on three sides, it's nice to see a little bit of motion on (or, really, near) the stage. The first half of the set is either one really long, complicated song or makes use of a series of really inspired segues and bridging loops. The myriad effects mean that we get a custom-built guitar sound for every section of every song, but he's also a hell of a guitar player, and there's even a fantastic bit where he's captured a number of different loops and he plays a bizarre solo by switching back and forth among them in time with the rhythm section. They finish with a new song which plays to all of these strengths nicely.
Piles are last, and are yet another band working the mostly-instrumental (but with occasional vocals, for texture), ambitiously structured music vein. Good bill! The room is pretty empty when they start with a quiet, spacey groove. (There was apparently some confusion earlier about whether this show would be 18+ or 21+, with the result that all beverages are restricted to the other side of the bar, so everyone hangs out there [or outside smoking] between sets.) But as soon as the volume kicks in, people make their way over. A decent turnout and an almost complete lack of reliance on the PA system has made this show sound a lot better than most I've seen in this room. Piles are a bit more brutal (especially once the bass is turned up loud enough), and have more crazy odd time signatures in their rhythms, so I am a dancing fool for pretty much their entire set. The guitar lines are angular and kind of tangy, with a certain painful beauty. It's all going amazingly well, and then one song (an incredibly tricky one, to be sure) sort of melts down and grinds to a halt. They pick it up again and finish strong, and then they play "the hit," the anthemic and crowd-pleasing "Sub-Mariner." But the drummer does so in a foul humor and immediately declares the set over by flinging away his drum kit in disgust. I respect perfectionism enormously, and I recognize that that intolerance for error is what makes their high-performance music possible. I just wish it hadn't prevented me from hearing more songs, because I really love this band.
