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Piles draws some of the most enthusiastic crowds I've ever seen at a small, local show. It's really nice to see. They're really on tonight: all the energy that generally makes their jagged, noisy rush of rhythms so wildly appealing to me, but more controlled and masterful than they sometimes manage. Chris breaks his E string very early on in the set, and impresses me by retuning and figuring out how to play the next song on five strings. Then it's a switch to the metal guitar (this phrase is both figurative and literal, if I'm not mistaken) for the song which fuses their original composition to part of a Rage Against the Machine cover. Always a crowd favorite. More broken strings are handled with aplomb.
The Creeping Nobodies are visiting from Canada. A five-piece (bass, drums, two guitars, and keyboard), they do a fair amount of switching off instruments and spreading around the vocal duties. Their music is tough to characterize—a very odd blend of yelping, spastic vocals from the guy who mostly plays guitar, with more tuneful stuff from the woman who mostly plays guitar and the woman who mostly plays keys, and guitar parts that range over a similarly broad territory. The touchstone I keep thinking of is Devo, which is odd because they really sound nothing like them. But the similarity is in the way a lot of effort has clearly gone into making a music almost entirely bereft of the warmth and emotional content that music would usually convey. I duck out to the men's room at one point, and when I return they're like a different band: gentler and more song-driven, with the guy who mostly plays bass down on the floor playing chimey little percussion instruments.
When I want to describe Helms to someone who's never seen or heard them, I tell them about the song on which the guitar player plays with his face. He's got both hands on the fretboard, chording with his upper hand and tapping with his lower hand, and alternate lines differ in whether the strings his chording hand are not holding down are open or damped, so he damps them by pressing the top of the guitar against his face. It's visually very cool, and the song sounds great. They play that one tonight. It's characteristic of probably the majority of their songs, which are warm, intricate, and technically stunning—the musical equivalent of the quality that visual artists refer to as "painterly." Then there are a minority of their songs that are more straightforward rockers. Sean McCarthy has a lovely singing voice; as the only one who ever speaks on the mic, he's also the de facto voice of the band, and he tells a wonderful story tonight between songs about putting on a new record and being intrigued by the band's extensive use of sampled dialogue, until Tina (his wife and bassist; this is a family band, with brother Dan on drums) realizes that the amplifier source is set wrong and they're listening to the TV.
