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It's a pretty fucked up night at the Middle East. Sound Team are touring, but apparently their touring partners bailed on this show on short notice, so Harris were added at the last minute, causing us to attend. No other bands got added, so it's just the two of them, with music starting around 11ish. Harris turn out not to have a set list ready, so Tom and I get the honor of kibitzing and putting in our requests. It's good to be mega-fans. Unfortunately, our dream set is not to be; this rapidly turns into the Technical Difficulties show. Jon's guitar develops weird and intrusive feedback, and every single component of the signal stream except the guitar itself is swapped out at some point during the set, to no effect. The noise is okay on their louder songs, but it causes them to drop a couple of quieter numbers from the set. (They lose a lot of time to their attempts to deal with the guitar, which also foreshortens the set, although we're treated to an embarrassing story about Matt's mom.) When the bass starts to cut out, it's actually almost funny. Best to have everything happen at once, and totally fuck up one set instead of compromising several. The songs they manage to play sound great, of course.
Sound Team are from Austin. With six people and three keyboards they rather crowd the stage, and provide ample opportunity for technical issues, but their problems are limited to the lead singer's guitars, which suffer a couple of broken strings, a couple of strap failures, and some sort of other mysterious malfunction. Aside from these problems (and a certain overall muddiness of sound that often besets bands with two guitars and two keyboards all going on once), they put on a fine show. They're a solid, catchy band. Their songs are kind of darkly poppy, with an '80s New Wave vibe at times. Their lead singer has a gruff, David Lowery thing going on with his voice. I find some of it a little too New Wave for my tastes, with overly simple, dancey drums, but they switch off between this and somewhat chewier fare. I also like the two songs for which the lead singer switches to piano, which are more lushly pretty.
