Index of Shows | Homepage | Upcoming Shows | Write to me
Those Who Wait put together this bill, and deserve serious kudos for it. I was just psyched to see Harris and Constants, but it turns out that the whole bill is really well-thought-out; the bands don't sound exactly like each other, but they all fit together really well, and you can imagine fans of any one of them liking the others.
As I believe I may have mentioned, I'm really psyched to see Harris again. Their mix is weird and not that great: everything but the drums is actually pretty well balanced, but the drums are way louder than everything else, and dominate the experience mercilessly. Good thing they're so good. Listening past them to focus on the band as a whole, I'm really struck by how well their first four songs display the range they're capable of. The first one is a hooky little pop song, albeit with a bit of a twist and some nice screaming near the end. The second is all twist, with its weird rhythms and wholesale shifts of tone and mood between sections. Then there's a pretty, gentle instrumental, with folky guitars, which segues into more of a hardcore screamer. And they do it all so well! We then get some new songs, which fall somewhere in the middle of the fairly expansive territory they've staked out so far. They close with the same new one they've been closing with the last couple of times I've seen them, and I LOVE this song, which fades out with a lovely, wordless chorus that really sticks with me.
Now for Constants, who, at last, at long last, are celebrating their CD release with actual copies of their actual CD! In celebration, they announce that they're basically just going to play the whole record, which sounds good to me. There's a jarring screwup in the first couple of seconds, and then they lock in together and sweep me away. The mix is perfect. The effects on the guitar and vocals are just right, pretty and spacey without turning them into a wash that loses contact with the fantastic rhythm section. The more I hear this material, the more I love it, because it's weird, excursive stuff, wandering from section to section, picking up old themes and turning them over to find out what they had hiding underneath them. As such, it's kind of a wild ride, and it can get pretty disorienting if you don't have a sense of the route. My very favorite part is a bit that has a 10-10-10-12-12 rhythmic structure and a beautiful guitar line, that crops up at a couple of different places in the set. I am so happy to have this album.
I duck across the street for a slice, so Those Who Wait are already playing when I come back in. My first thought is, "Holy shit, that's a lot of drums!" My second thought is, "How the fuck many drums is that, anyway?!?" Eventually, I have to count: 5 toms, snare, and bass (double-kick, naturally), 8 cymbals, 2 high hats, and a couple of pads for electronic drum triggering. It's very extreme, and I'm not really sure he uses all of that fully, but he does do some very ambitious things with rhythm, many of which I have a lot of trouble following. I think that's just because it's outrageously complicated, but there are a few points where I'm not so sure that he's not just messing up. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt for now, since he's obviously really talented. The strings are kind of tame by comparison, but the singer is excellent, with a clear and powerful voice and simple, engaging melodies. There is one song that I laugh at a bit. It's a little unfair, as I may have been primed--earlier this evening, someone asked me whether any of these bands are "emo," as he was trying to figure out what that is--but one of these songs is pretty emo, with that excessively earnest delivery of a line something like "This is more than my heart can take." After I point this out, he does the drop-to-a-whisper-then-repeat-it-in-a-shout thing, and that's when I laugh. But that's really the only song that has that problem; the rest are strong, quirky, intricate songs. (He introduces the last song by saying, "This song is called, 'Your Songs Are Too Long and Have No Hooks.'")
The Alienist Outfit are last. Not a lot of people stick around this late; I'm pretty tired myself, but I want to at least give them a listen, since the rest of the bill has been so strong, and they make me want to stay for their whole set. They're a six piece: drums, bass, keyboard, singer, and two guitarists, one of whom also sings. Most of the time, both singers are singing together, in harmony, and that's the thing about this band that's special for me. The instruments are a little unremarkable. They're very good, and the guitars have interesting tone contrast, with one more mellow and the other sharper and more slashing in sound, but none of the instrumentalists really grab me in the first half of the set. It's their weird harmonies that pull me in. They're not pretty, at all really, but they're not dissonant either. They clearly go together, but not in a normal way. Very interesting, and both men are strong singers. The lead guitarist (the one who's not singing, with the sharper guitar sound) branches out a bit later in the set, and one song with a slightly cheesy mock-Hawaiian slide intro has some really neat soloing later in it.
