Index of Shows | Homepage | Upcoming Shows | Write to me
Tonight's show is a benefit for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, so there are six bands playing short sets, a killer bakesale, and a raffle that Tom and I collectively buy about half the tickets for. (The prize, free admission to Great Scott for you and a guest for a year, is so tempting that we feel little impulse to control ourselves. And it's for a good cause.)
Reports are a very odd band. They start out with a noisy, psychedelic vibe tonight. But after a couple of songs like that, a completely different sound emerges, drawing heavily on the same English Music Hall tradition that informed early Bowie and The Beatles. These are the two major influences that they fuse; some songs lean toward the first, some toward the second, and some balance the two impulses. It's a very, very strange mixture, but they make it work.
The Chainletter start out as a five-piece, but after a couple of songs, one of their guitarists switches to second keyboard and a new guitarist joins them. Two guitars, two keyboards, bass and drums, plus two of them sing, powerfully. It's strong stuff, but it gets to be too much: the overall sound gets muddy and blurred. And when you sound muddy at Great Scott, with Ben doing the sound, it's you. The songs themselves rock hard, with heavy use of impressive shouted-harmony vocals, so a bit of judicious pruning in the arrangements could make me like this band a lot.
We just saw The Bon Savants here on Saturday, and they were so damn good that I'm really excited to see them again. The room is starting to fill up at this point. Since it's a short set tonight, we get kind of a "greatest hits" set. They're beautiful songs, shimmery Britpop with teeth, and there's just absolutely nothing wrong with this band.
Night Rally haven't played in forever, it seems. (They've been recording, so I'm not going to complain.) They start by soliciting requests from their first demo, and play the first request they hear, "A Birthday Party." They actually seem a little sloppy tonight, by Night Rally standards. But those are high standards, so I'm inclined to cut them a bit of slack. After the request, they play a much newer song, which is very effective—their recent material seems to include a lot more songs on which all three of them sing, and since they have three very different and complementary vocal styles, these songs rule. Luke develops some serious hi-hat problems, but decides to soldier through as they close the set with their triptych. It's huge and deep, and it's fun to see Luke improvise ways to deal with the defective hi-hat.
Emergency Music are next. This isn't really their crowd, somehow, and the people that were packing the floor in front of the stage for Night Rally are kind of conspicuously absent during this set. Emergency Music play quality pop songs, but they're just a little bit, well, boring. Earnest and nice, and a little low-energy. I like the pretty high harmony backing vocals.
The Lot Six (of whom there are four) are another band that combine two quite different sounds and somehow make it work. There's a thick, sludgy stoner rock thing going on here, and the singer's weird vocal delivery emphasizes this. His voice seems to keep reminding me of someone, and I can't think who. I get a whiff of Gibby Hayes, a touch of Jack White, maybe a trace of Beck? He doesn't really sound exactly like any of those, but perhaps if you triangulate among them you can imagine where he's going. But then there's the piano. The keyboard lines are much crisper and cleaner and sort of balance out what's going on in the guitar and vocals. They do sound weird with the rest of the band, but they contribute a little bit of prettiness that makes the whole thing hold together for me.
