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As I walk in on Chromelodeon's set, it is obvious that there is a Show going on. There are projections on both side walls, and a bank of colored lights in front of the stage (not the house colored lights; they brought their own) being controlled in time to the music. I am intrigued. As I start to pay attention to what's going on musically, I am amused and appalled. I quickly cease to be amused. Chromelodeon is a seven-piece, all instrumental, with two guitars, bass, drums, and three keyboard players. (One of them has a keytar!) Their music is kind of noodley/dancey, with a lot of cheesy, tinny synth patches, and never really goes anywhere. There's a lot of energy, but no songs as such, and the harmonic progressions just seem really bland and obvious to me. After a while, the stage lights are brought up at the end of a song, which seems a fairly clear signal that it's time to stop now, but they announce the next song, requiring the sound guy to step in and tell them that they're done. Which, fortunately, he does.
Shortfilm have a brand new bassist tonight. As in, he joined a week ago and he's had three practices. Given that, his performance tonight is nothing short of amazing. These are not simple, easy songs; they're fast and jerky, with lots of stop-start dynamics, and a couple of them have dense, complicated bass lines that provide the main melodic element while the guitars are spewing crazy, noisy distortion. So I'm very impressed that they seem so tight and solid. Vocals are all over the map, screamy on some songs and tuneful on others. There is one slow song tonight, and it's ponderously, audience-torturingly slow. Eraserhead slow. I like it.
If Radar Records had a flag, it would have a reverb pedal and a delay pedal on a blue field. I've been wanting to see Junius for a long time now, as I love their labelmates so, and I am not disappointed. What the Radar bands tend to have in common are steady, powerful, and interesting rhythm sections; a HUGE, oceanic wash of guitar sounds; and vocals with a lot of effects layered on them. (And blue lights.) What distinguishes Junius, to my ears, is their tight, somewhat poppy song structures, which sort of help to ground all that guitar goodness. I have some issues with the singer's voice—the high register that he spends most of his time in combines with the effects on his vocal to give a weirdly '80s sound. (The Cure, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, etc.) When he's not doing that, it's one of several kinds of good: there are floaty and dreamy parts, and his gruff (and sadly underutilized) lower register sounds awesome with the effects on it, as do his screams. (The delay on the screams is particularly tasty.) So I'd like him to just try to spread the vocals around more among the styles he already uses.
Spreading themselves among different styles is what Harris do best. This is what I love about this band; a song might start with a synthy drum machine beat, which I would normally hate, but before it even has time to get annoying they'll come in over it with a lovely, melodic verse that might veer off into some weird rhythm in the chorus and an intense, screaming bridge. And yet it doesn't feel like a hodgepodge to me; they just have a lot of skills to draw on. And I like the way Mike, the lead singer, is forever playing with the phrasing of songs, so that even familiar tunes sound new. They do overuse repetition between verses, I think, but the phrasing thing helps with that by making the same words sound different on successive hearings. They're working on a new album, which I'm dying to hear, so tonight's set is just a couple of old songs and a bunch of new ones which are starting to get familiar. "Carousel" is quirky and catchy, and "Captain Awesome" is fucking majestic. I'm not the only one singing along this time, I'm pleased to note.
They finish up early enough that we're able to duck next door to ZuZu! and catch Of the Lion, which tonight consists solely of Bill Trevaskis and his gear. (Well, and a really disturbing mask that he wears for most of his set.) He's mostly playing pedals and feedback, with a Casio to provide some seed signal that he quickly outgrows, and some odd kind of Baby's First Sampling Keyboard that has a microphone that he screams into. The signal from that is so distorted and processed that his screams don't really convey the sense of a voice, but they do provide a good rhythmic element, along with a really chunky buzz that he gets out of some configuration of pedals and sets looping. There is also a guitar, which he beats with drumsticks for a while. Then, when it seems like he's done, he picks up the guitar, trades the disturbing mask for a cowboy hat, and sings us a song. It's a weird and corny slice of Americana, and possibly the only thing that could still shock us after the recent sonic assault. And then he's done.
