Note to Floristree: please start a subwoofer donation bucket now. You know, a place where people can drop the odd spare change or $5 bill in the hopes that, someday, shows at the much beloved warehouse space will have some low end in the mix. We can deal with the heat. We can deal with lugging around the warming beverages stashed in the messenger bag. We can deal with everything that comes with a warehouse show. You serve a much needed role in local music in Baltimore, and we’d quite simply like to be able to hear a kick drum when there’s one onstage.
The totally trebly sound system didn’t faze Abe Vigoda one bit. The Los Angeles quartet spits out a jittery, sprinting guitar rock that wouldn’t know what to do with a steady, regular beat even if it could be heard through the monitors. And for most of its brisk set, Abe Vigoda cranked out the sort of chugging restless noise cranked out by bands such as Gaunt and Truman’s Water in the early 1990s, bands that made a glorious racket out of guitars that always sounded like they were running away from each other and still managed to swell into a surging crest. Abe Vigoda adds a daft sense of melody to that ramshackle mess, injecting a patina of pop hooks into its shambolic grooves. Plus, any band in which both singing guitarists rock matching hairstyles is a fun time–especially when they’re both sporting a face-hiding skate-punk flip that once made the Bar-B-Q Killers’ Laura Carter such an impudent stage force. (The Baltimore taper captured the show in case you missed it.)
New York’s High Places scratched an itch we didn’t even know we had: Cocteau Twins vocals draped over a Boards of Canada watery groove. This duo of Rob Barber (electronics, electronic percussion) and Mary Pearson (voice) sharply turned the vibe in the room into one suited for cool, shimmering beats. Set up on the side stage in front of the room’s southern windows, Barber and Pearson draped their gear in a weedy tangle of aqua-blue Christmas lights, and when the house lights went out, the duo looked like a pair of undulating underwater creatures. Barber would fire up the skeleton of a programmed beat, typically something slight and borderline woozy, and over it layer a filigree of electronic smashes before hammering out a bottleneck jolt of watery percussions. They both bopped in place behind their setup like pistons powering a hovercraft, and slowly they began to venture into a levitating realm where bedroom pop and DIY dance beats coil around each other and try to hatch some new breed of DNA. Sometimes this Frankensteining took root, sometimes it didn’t, but the band never stopped trying to breathe sincere life into its creation. No idea what Pearson was singing, but if the lyrics at all emotionally complement the music’s coral-reef mood, then bravo.
Los Angeles’ No Age, like its tourmate Abe Vogda, was nurtured at an idealistic art community incubated at an L.A. club called the Smell, a fact seemingly inseparable from discussing No Age in any of the myriad of absurdly fawning reviews of its 2007 singles collection Weirdo Rippers and its 2008 Sub Pop debut, Nouns. It’s reported as the sort of young hive of DIY activity–see also: Wham City, with whom it has been compared/talked about as coming from a similar positive impulse–an attitude you suspect No Age smelted into its lyrics for Nouns‘s “Teen Creeps”: “Wash away what we create/ My sins like funny calls you make/ Teen creeps I’ve seen you on my street/ Teen creeps get what they want and me / I won’t end up like them at all.”
On Weirdo Rippers No Age comes across as delightfully impetuous no-fi punks; for Nouns, guitarist Randy Randall and drummer/vocalist/electronics man Dean Spunt ambitiously aim for droning punk soundscape of hooky guitar riffs bleeding into ambient ooze. And onstage, No Age sounded like just another underground rock duo that is good at not playing the blues.
Stripped of Nouns‘ abrasively comforting production and plunked down on a stage with no low end coming out of the speakers, Randall and Spunt sounded like two guys banging through some basic rock chords and stomp, spitting out a fine mess, mind you, but a well-trod, familiar mess all the same. Don’t get me wrong–I love bands good at playing badly, especially when they serve it up with something resembling an organizing idea. Tonight, though, No Age sounded way too tame and even one-dimensional. Even with all the sweat and energy coursing through the room–the expected bodies and hair flailing–and being able to pick out songs from the set list (“Every Artist Needs a Strategy,” “Boy Void,” “Teen Creeps”), No Age’s set steamrolled itself into one loud smear of high-end energy. It was a nice way to go just a little bit more deaf, but an ear-ringing witnessed many, many, many times before.