Gig: Anagram

Anagram (Deloro / Bruised Knees)

The Shop under Parts & Labour. Friday, October 22, 2010.

A return for Anagram to the bomb-shelter environs of The Shop, this time as the headliner celebrating the long-awaited release of Majewski¹, their second album. The album adds by subtraction, stripping things down to the raw fury that the band exhibits at their shows, with Willy Mason's taut guitar lines the counterpoint to brother Matt's aggressively slurred vocals.

This would count as highly-anticipated in some circles, and I figured there'd be a tightly-packed crowd coming out for this one. I figured it would be a good idea to get there early — fortunately there was an intriguing pair of openers to start things up.

Leading off the night was Bruised Knees, who don't share much information about themselves on their myspace, but I recognized Chuck Skullz (ex-Creeping Nobodies). Leading off with a five-minute instrumental featuring textured guitar and extra percussion, they were definitely not afraid to let the songs stretch out. With a detuned, off-centre groove, the first point of comparison here is probably going to be Sonic Youth — Skullz' guitar work (at one point he jammed a screwdriver in the neck of his guitar) and vox do bring Thurston Moore to mind.² But Natalie Logan's vocals, as well as her extra percussion, tug that in a different direction. Apparently the first time out with a new lineup, the band (anchored by Dennis Amos' drums and Graham Hancock's bass) was pretty fluid in the execution, which is vital for music that is more about the texture than singalong moments. Enjoyable stuff.³

Listen to a track from this set here.

I definitely came to this show excited to see Deloro again — the first time 'round they were very much an unknown quality to me, though with some intriguing familiar faces. While they set up, someone beside me in the crowd had asked me if I knew anything about the band and I gave a flip response along the lines of "imagine if Slint recorded a country album". Which was succinct and adequately reductionist for random semi-shouted conversation with strangers in a dark bar, but obviously a bit short on nuance. Still, as the band started playing at a slow simmer, if felt kinda right. The trio of vocalist/guitarists up front (Jennifer Castle, Paul Mortimer and Tony Romano) worked off each other as drummer David Clarke (a member of $100 alongside Mortimer) and bassist Dallas Wehrle (ex-Constantines) kept order.

The place was now packed and boiling, the band playing to a semi-attentive audience, even right up front. It was a "hey brah"-heavy crowd — about whom we'll hear more anon — treating this as background noise while busily getting their drink on. Some material managed to cut through — especially the superb "Drugs", as well as a pair with Jennifer Castle on lead vox. If there's a connection to the hurtingest kind of country music here, it's the the general sense of dread that the music trades in — the sense that things have been going wrong for a long while, and everything points to things going wrong up ahead. The music slowly built up to a shouty frenzy ("she said, 'take me as I am!'") and Paul Mortimer's closer had a bit of a redemptive vibe to send things out on a less-bleak note. Powerful stuff, and I was glad to have caught the band again, though I still hunger to hear them under slightly better conditions.

Listen to a track from this set here.

And then, The Shop was at about maximum crammage as Anagram took over. Launching straight into a schizophrenically locked groove, it took about the length of a song for the crowd to reach the hypnotized state that seems to take people over whenever they play. By the time band launched into "I've Been Wrong Before", bodies were bouncing around, and soon, it was pretty crazy.

Given singer Matt Mason's propensity to wander out among the crowd, there's always a fuzzy sense of where the band's space ends and the audiences' begins — and in the no-stage setup at Parts & Labour, it was even fuzzier than usual. The front rank of the crowd were pressing in past the monitors and the mosh-y people were getting really intense. People — by which I mean "dudes" — were pounding on the low ceiling when not bracing themselves against it to gain leverage as bodies bounced around.

When Mason wandered into the crowd, he was getting more than just bumped into, and the people pressing forward were knocking into the gear. From what I've seen of Anagram, it says something when the crowd is getting too much for the band. After "Evil", Mason inveighed against the crowd, "this is fun, but could people stop treating this like a fucking therapy session!"

Playing for nearly an hour, this was a marathon set by Anagram standards that allowed for not only an intense airing of the Majewski material but more as well. Not only did the band play go-to Cleavers cover "Fish", but also took a run through Leonard Cohen's "The Butcher".⁴ In one sense this shouldn't surprise, as Mason's songwriting, full of internal rhyme schemes, is less far away from folk cadences than you might expect. And lyrically, this one fits just fine into the Anagram worldview: "Well, I found a silver needle, I put it into my arm. It did some good, did some harm."

And then just a couple more to close it out, the quicker "Oh Well" followed by an extended run through the appropriate-to-finish-with "That's a Wrap". The set ended with Mason calling out individuals from the crowd: "You're an asshole."

Now, I come from outside of the punk/moshing culture, so admittedly some of the subtleties are lost on me, but I left the show thinking about the relationship between this band and their music and how crowds react to it. Is the crossing of a line from self-governed frenzy to assholish disruption a logical extension of the behaviour that band encourages? At some level this is music with a murky relationship between bad vibes and catharsis mediated through aggression and controlled chaos. Ask any suburban kid who tried making napalm in their back yard and you'll hear about the fine line between ecstatic release and getting burned. But it must be tough for a band that banks on a very particular kind of dynamic with the crowd to power their performances to depend on everyone — even the Friday-night "hey brah!" lunkheads — to understand the limits how far they can push things. Or each other.

But still, if you're not interested in the social experiment angle of an Anagram show — and not all of them are like this, by any means — you can still experience what's best of them in your own headspace with a copy of Majewski.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ The album is titled in tribute to late poster artist and friend of the band, Michael Majewski.

² Skullz was a precision craftsman, with one rack of effects for his guitar (which was then, I believe, run through a keyboard) and another for his vocals.

³ I've already seen this band in further action and I can report that they're getting into their groove even more than when I saw 'em here. I do recommend checking them out.

⁴ "The Butcher" is now available with "Fish" on a 7" from the Telephone Explosion label.