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I've never been to AS220 before. It's a great space, big and open, with a huge stage and cool art on the walls to check out between bands. First up on tonight's bill are Kalpana, from New York. Sometimes, when they are a spacey instrumental rock band with a brutally fast and hard-hitting drummer, I like them very much. When they crank up the drum machine and the drummer plays keyboard, they are much less to my taste. And when they try to sing it's appalling. They're shockingly off pitch, and when several of them sing "unison" it really accentuates that. (It doesn't help that what they're apparently trying to sing sounds like very pleasant melodies, which don't lend themselves to this treatment the way a grungier song would.) Fortunately, they don't sing on the last few songs.
Tristan Da Cunha are the main reason I'm here. I really grew accustomed to seeing them weekly during their residency, and I haven't enjoyed going more than a month without a Tristan set. They start right in with "World of Rubber," one of our favorites, which is everything a Tristan song should be. Jumpy and weird, incredibly challenging, with bizarre jump cuts and rhythms that feel like they can't possibly be right (but they are), yet with freakishly catchy little tunes and riffs and an overarching composed rightness. I've missed this. They continue in this vein—the still-untitled new song is getting more followable and engaging each time I hear it, even with its bizarrely long and involuted guitar line—and then Ernie and Steve switch places, and they pull out a couple of instrumental songs from Steve's old band Spineless, which they learned for their residency.
The Tremula are here all the way from Salt Lake City. (Damn, those Utah boys are cute!) Their approach seems to be to play pop tunes—sunny, catchy pop tunes, with pretty vocal harmonies—very fast, with layers of noisy guitar on top of them. It's a good combination. There are problems early in the set: one singer's voice takes a lot of getting used to, kind of helium-high and nasal, and the drummer is not as steady as I might wish. But (as I later learn) he's playing on a borrowed kit, and by the third song or so, he gets comfortable with it and evens out his tempi. The lead guitarist also gets credit for blithely soldiering forward after breaking a string on the first song, playing most of the set on five strings and sounding great. The other two switch off on bass and guitar, plus occasional keyboard and some sort of percussion instrument that looks like a cluster of mussel shells on a stick.
Sadly, tonight is Miniwatt's last show ever. The genius of Miniwatt's songs is that they do not overstay their welcome. They are fairly simple songs, played ultrafast with spikey guitar parts and mostly shouted vocals, and each song has one or two good musical ideas. A song might be built around a gorgeous guitar riff, a killer bass line, or an amazing drum pattern, and it'll just briefly explore the possibilities of that idea, then suddenly end. And it's on to the next song. (A couple of the newer songs have two sections, each of which on its own sticks pretty closely to this pattern, but this enables them to also play with the idea of transitions. I'd have liked to hear how they would have continued to develop.) There's a funny/sad moment near the end of the set, when the penultimate song gets fucked up and crashes to a halt. They jokingly (?) blame each other and say See? This is why we're breaking up. Then they finish with one more quick blast. It seems a weirdly abrupt ending, but anything else would be untrue to the band they were.
