Bocce (RatTail)
The Lower Ossington Theatre (SummerWorks Festival). Saturday, August 14, 2010.
The last night of the SummerWorks concert series was not overrun with patrons. No doubt a lot of the potential draw was on the Island watching Arcade Fire, or just pulled away by other Saturday night options.
Like a couple other shows in the run, this wasn't an immediately intuitive doubleheader, so I was curious to see if there was going to be non-overlapping crowds eager for each of the bands. Or maybe no crowd at all. Even with the start time pushed back there were still only about twentyish — maybe — people on hand as RatTail began. A slightly different lineup for the band, now featuring Tim Fagan (ex-Germans) on bass, who was keeping a close eye on drummer Jesse Matthews. I'm guessing both from being less familiar with the material as much as a matter of style, his bottom-end work was a bit more restrained and lower in the mix than I've seen with the band in the past.
A few songs in, the Bocce crowd started to arrive. Though they looked like they were ready for a night of dancing, while RatTail was on they sat down and ignored the band more or less. The set became a sort of case study on the whole notion of the artist feeding off the crowd's energy — or the lack of it in this case. Sometimes, a band will get into it when there's not a lot of attention being paid to them, to try and spark some energy on the room, or just, like, kick against the indifference. Here, instead of amping it up, guitarist/vocalist Jasmyn Burke closed in a bit — during "In Bloom", she sang with her eyes closed, as if she were drawing out a hazy memory of something.
With all of that, the overall vibe of the set was more contained than I've seen from the band in the past. Some of that might just be in the nature of the band's newer material, like "Green Guitar" (complete with harmonica) and the introspective "I Simply". As with the other times I've seen RatTail, I enjoyed it, but this time 'round the band felt a bit too tentative.
Listen to a track from this set here.
A lot of the time there's diminishing returns involved if you see a band more than once in a short period of time, so I was a little worried that I might not be viewing Bocce with fresh eyes, having caught them just a week before at the ALL CAPS Island show. As their set started, the room was fuller than it had been for RatTail, but it was still pretty sparse. Most of the crowd were right up on the floor, though there were a few people sitting a couple rows back in the seats, like they were expecting a play rather than a dance party.
Ben Ong, whose keyboard was set up below the stage, started things off by playing drumsticks on the dancefloor, quickly shattering one. That would be a sign of things to come. When I last saw them, I noted how they're very "live" for an electronic band. Here, there was a bit of gear failure, one of the Casios sorta falling over and getting unplugged, forcing some on-the-fly improvisation to keep things going. After that, the keyboard was on the fritz, forcing the band to decide what they could play that wasn't reliant on it. But none of that managed to block the band's momentum.
Once again demonstrating that no stage can contain him, singer Tony Salomone jogged off to grab a beer during one song's introduction and otherwise kept mobile. There were plenty of live-contingent moments throughout — someone would accidentally step on a tambourine, pick it up and bash it for a bit and then kick it away. Being forced to say, "We're making this up as we go along" might be an admission for some bands that they were over their heads, but here it felt like the band was plunged right into their element. Here's an example of a band that rolled with a small crowd and equipment problems and took it up a notch or several, pulling out a totally fun set.
Is it just random, the things we come to like? Who'd've thunk it that I'd come to enjoy Bocce this much? As things wrapped up, I grabbed a copy of their Disambigulation album1. In the end, it was a fascinating show on several levels, and a worthy close to the SummerWorks concert series, even if it didn't get the draw it deserved.2
Listen to a track from this set here.
1 Although I suggest you should also head out to a show and grab a copy from the band, you can also download it here for free.
2 And once again, we should single out programmer Kevin Parnell, who put together a fine set of shows. We should also note that SummerWorks 2011 is slated to run August 5-15, so make a preliminary note in your calendar now.
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