Gig: Wavelength 450 (Saturday)

Gig: Wavelength 450 ($100 / Brides / Hooded Fang / The Luyas / Element Choir)

Polish Combatants Hall. Saturday, February 14, 2009.

With this getting a buncha press (incl an eye cover story) I had no idea how early the crowds were gonna show up, but I was having a quiet evening anyway and erred on the side of getting there responsibly early. So I managed to snag a chair and settle in with a dirt cheap drink in the rec hall-type surroundings of the Polish Combatants Hall. Not a bad place to see a gig, even if it sometimes has a bit of a musty basement smell. Sadly, they took down all the unit insignia banners on the upper reaches of the walls for some reason.

It turned out to be a robustly full house, with, I think, a healthy number of folks like me, who appreciate the idea of Wavelength, but can't make it out for shows on a Sunday night. But also some just making the scene, out for something that was "hot" and on eye's cover. Or so I'm guessing — maybe it was that subset of people who were up near the front but still remained committed to talking loudly with their friends. Frustrating.

Based on the blurbs, I wasn't sure that a large improv choir was going to be, well, good, but I was pleasantly surprised. Starting off like the soundtrack of the journey into the monolith at the end of 2001 crossed with a dadaist tone poem, Element Choir's performance branched into a wide-ranging exploration of the range of noises the human voice can make. The conductor ran the choir in a manner that made me think of performers with laptops and looping pedals — picking out one range of the group, giving a gestural signal, and letting them make that noise while turning to tweak the noise that another section was making, and building up various textures playing off each other. It was a rather warm sort of sensation. Felt human.

Stowed my bag and jacket on my seat and went up closer to the stage as each of the bands proper came on. The Luyas were okay. The vocalist was compelling, but the band's sonic approach didn't do much for me, eschewing the easy things (like melodies) for something a bit more adventurous, leaving a sort of spare, deconstructed song-sense.

Hooded Fang were sort of just the opposite, all poppy and happy and dance-friendly. Which disposed me much more towards them. Co-ed and seven members deep with a whole bunch of keybs and horns and tinkling glocks, a facile comparison might be to Los Campesinos!, but without their Cure-ish undertone. Perhaps hitting closer to the mark would be to think of it as something like widescreen A&C-style pop (Stars, or BSS, a little) covering The Bicycles. Regardless, they had good songs and a joyful attitude. I bought their EP at the merch table and would keep my eye out to see them again.^*

Brides were enjoyable enough, but any more than the short set they played would have been too much for me. Pick your identifier — post-punk/no wave, probably. Which is to say a rhythm section once-removed from hardcore roots, but tending occasionally to shift into technically tricky shifting time signatures, etc. I liked 'em best when they avoided that, and stuck to less chords. They had a skronky sax player who looked disconcertingly like Gary Busey in The Buddy Holly Story.

$100 was a band that won me over last year, and I ultimately ended up seeing them twice in the full band configuration, and twice more as an acoustic duo. I'd been excited by the fact that some of the best songs I'd heard them play were already moving beyond their fine Forest of Tears album. Perhaps it was the fact that I was starting to wear down, or just my heightened expectations that left me with the sense that this wasn't quite as good as I'd seen them do previously. (Or perhaps the fact that they were playing, I think, with a different rhythm section than I recall.) And by this point, I was surrounded, it seemed, by yappy people. So I wasn't totally feelin' it. But it was going okay enough. Though when they got to the stately, gorgeous waltz of "Nothing's Alright", Simone commanded the crowd to slow dance, and folks all around started to comply. When one of a group of yammering women to my left looked past me to grab a guy on my right to sway together, and her friends started talking even louder, I decided to move back for some peace of mind. But the spell was broken, and all at once I was feeling tired and antsy to go catch the subway, so I kept a moving back to my chair, threw on my jacket and split. I had a bit of wiggle time to catch the train, but I didn't want to miss it.

All in all, though, a satisfying night. One thing that came out in that eye story is that one year hence, with the tenth anniversary, Wavelength will cease as a Sunday night thing and transform into... something else. If that something else is shows like this, then I'd probably end up at more Wavelength overall.

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^* Weirdly, I managed to be sitting once again right next to a bunch of Band Parents, who were busily sizing up the competition and comparing their offspring to The Luyas. "Oh, they were much better than that first bunch," said one, "they sound like a real band."