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It's a Math-Rock-O-Rama at the Middle East tonight. The last time I saw Tristan da Cunha I had no idea what to expect. Tonight I do, and it's all there: the jagged, intricate guitar figures, gorgeous with distortion; the surreal lyrics and freaky, dramatic stage presence; the powerful, precise drumming; and, most of all, the wild profusion of rhythms and time signatures, expertly handled. Fives, elevens, fourteens--this, for me, is dance music. In an attempt to be fair and balanced, I'll point out that there are no hooks. You won't walk out humming their songs. I swear I don't miss them.
After that, anyone would sound simple and straightforward. The Ruby Doe certainly do, but there's some interesting stuff going on, and the bassist sings good melodies in a good voice. One song has an intro in seven, and it looks like this band will be a good fit for the bill, but then things rather fall apart. It seems they've front-loaded all their interesting material, and by the fifth song they are a strum-and-scream-in-fast-four punk band. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and they do it very well: very tight, and with occasional decent guitar leads. But it's not what I came here for.
Constants in Breaking crank the weirdness back up. There seem to be two things going on here. The guitarist sings lovely melodies and plays beautiful, spacy guitar lines, with massive amounts of reverb and delay, giving a soothing, almost ambient effect. On the other side of the stage, the rhythm section seem to be sharing a psychotic break. It's a good one, with rhythms ranging from hard-to-count to give-up-and-let-the-music-shake-you, and they are sharing it; they might as well be chained together, they play in such perfect synchrony. I just can't see what it has to do with what the guitarist is doing. It's all very cool and very good, but somewhat disjoint.
Last up are Shark and Bear, a four-piece, and I find I spend much of their set wondering why I'm not enjoying it more. It seems to have all the same pieces as Tristan da Cunha, who kicked my ass, and yet I am unmoved. I think that one problem is the even more neurotically frequent rhythm changes: rather than changing the time signature before it gets boring, they change it before I have a chance to notice it. The other problem is just that they're not quite as tight as tonight's other bands. The drummer, in particular, is not perfect. He's not at all bad; in most bands, I think he'd be fine. But this is some seriously demanding, high-definition music, and for it to work, everyone has to be precise. The bassist, though, is stellar, and almost saves the rhythm section single-handedly.
