DAPS All-Ages 6 (feat. Colour Connection / Nicholas Doubleyou and The B-Squad / Hut / Abstract Random / Army Girls)
Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Arts & Culture. Saturday, February 12, 2011.
The decoration was a little more bare-bones than at past DAPS shows that I'd been to in this Kensington basement space, but it was still a welcoming environment for this afternoon show. And it was indeed welcoming to all, I noted, as I watched a steady stream of teenagers fill in the space around me. It looked like a lot of them were friends out to see openers Colour Connection. The band — high-schoolers like the crowd here to watch 'em — were working out some kinks in the sound system while the teens on the floor started to look bored. I could almost see the gears of their minds processing the vague standing-around frustration that one gets inured to as a concert-goer: "first thing you learn is that you always gotta wait". Meanwhile, a loop somewhere in the wiring of the PA was picking up a Chinese-language radio station, which would be faintly audible in the background between songs.
For their part, as they finally were ready to play, the band looked excited at the very prospect of having a gig. But for all that, they played with well-rehearsed composure. The set started with a bit of an overture before launching into the first song, showing an ability to play with dynamics and layer their sounds. The songs featured shared/dual lead vox most of the time, and seemed to be inspired by slightly-clenched modern rock. With six musicians across the stage, there was at times a feeling that they were glomming what they knew how to do — including a mandolin that was somewhat at odds with the musical direction — into the songs, instead of serving the songs with the most appropriate backing.
But hey: like most young people, they don't really know what they want to be yet, and they aren't yet what they're going to become. That's more cause for celebration than anything. They're starting from a skillful level, so this is a band that needs to keep having fun playing, and listening to and discovering more good music — and someday the creative seeds might grow into the least-expected things.
As if to help sketch out a narrative of the difference between high-school eagerness and world-weary university defeatism, Nicholas Doubleyou and The B-Squad were next up. Irony and slackerdom get a bad rap, but they're important stages of discovery on life's journey. Nicholas Doubleyou looked like he could have been one of the guys in the previous band just a couple years previous, but things change rapidly when you move away from home, get your heart broken, flip through Nietzsche and discover a whole universe of music outside the sanitized corporate pipeline.
One thing this crew had learned is that one way of getting better is to get worse in the formal, musical sense. The band launched into a ragged-ass folkrock clatter that felt like it could fall down at any moment, while Doubleyou, pushed along by rocking yakkety sax, sang with hiccups and squeals, lines ending in yips and hollers. The ramshackle soundworld was a perfect backdrop to tales of optimism sliding into disaffection: "this song's about failing university!" was the introduction to one — "I'm on the brink of nothing new" was the memorable lyrical zinger.
Doubleyou came across like one his lyrics. Looking for a guitar pick, at one point he haphazardly emptied the contents of his pockets on the floor, and he'd later enlist his sax player to tune his guit between songs. ("I'm not really a trained musician," he commented.)
But the key here is that this wasn't a gloom-fest — in this life, despite all the stumbles and angsty moments, there's still a lot of discoveries to be made, songs to listen to, and friends to make music with. In fact, looking closer at Doubleyou, I noticed that he was wearing stripes of facepaint, as was the rest of the band — as if they were defeating all of these little miseries with their own communal ritual. And toward set's end, the band distributed balloons with oblique strategy-like instructions written on them to the audience ("spin around", "fast dance"), bringing them into the community as well.
This was scrappy, rough fun that suited me just fine. It's a bit of a tough line to walk — when the just-on-the-edge of tottering over moments are the best part, it can be hard to reach that point without it feeling contrived. But for the moment, the band were about exactly in the sweet spot.1
Listen to a track from this set here.
That would be followed by HUT, another band that doesn't specialize in the hi-fi experience, but no amount of rough-and-ready bashing away can hide the popcraft that vocalist Daniel Lee (also of Hooded Fang) brings to the table. Taking the stage, the band were a little slow getting themselves together, but with the opening "On Parole", I thought for a moment that they might be exhibiting a new sort of professionalism. The following tune (suggestively entitled "Barf", which one hung-over member looked to be on the verge of throughout the set) snapped back to the band's more ramshackle mode, however, and things mostly stayed there for the rest of the set. Which is fine — this project thrives on the chaos created in the collision between Lee's pop skills and the band's blind-leap-off-the-high-board accompaniment.
Bringing the same five-man lineup as when I had last seen 'em, there was again no keyboard, and Alex Laurence's2 guitar sounded more integrated into the loose-knit fabric. With no setlist per se, Lee would flip through his notebook of lyrics between songs until he came to one that struck him, and spent most of the time while the band was playing wandering in front of the stage.
Out of that quickly-growing songbook, the band played seven songs, including a run through The Clean's "Thumbs Off". The recorded versions — and you can grab 'em at your leisure over on their soundcloud page — are a little less rollicking than their live incarnations, a difference attributable to Daniel "Moon King" Woodhead's live drumwork, delivered as a barrage from his minimal stand-up kit. It's high-energy and something you can dance to throughout, definitely worth checking out.3
Listen to a track from this set here.
I knew nothing about Abstract Random, but I well-disposed toward them right away when I saw them taking the stage with the day's most strikingly visual presentation. The set started off with a couple mildly-downtempo songs led by Ayo Leilani's strong vocals, while in front of her a pair of figures danced in furry suits and papier-maché masks. When the masks came off, revealing more careful preparation underneath, Jamilah Malika greeted the crowd by commenting, "we're the rappers who wear facepaint."
There was a bit of a stylistic torque from Leilani's material to the songs with Malika's rhymes, but both were supported by Francesca Nocera's hard-hitting and minimalist beats. From there, the band really started firing on all cylinders with the thoroughly excellent "Cowboy", a song that vividly (though thankfully not didactically) unpacked coded notions of masculine power ("homoerotic/ Batman & Robin/ smack my ass/ I'm a football player"). With socially-conscious lyrics and a proudly feminist stance, the group situated themselves in hip-hop's long tradition of political songwriting.
The same awareness of power dynamics with which they discussed gender and sexuality was brought to bear on the G-20 inspired "New World Order". But the band's truth-to-power approach was directed at their own community as well, the set ending with the powerful anti-homophobic anthem "Mi Nah Wanna", reclaiming dancehall riddims to proclaim "Mi nah wanna hear 'em chat 'bout violence / mi nah wanna hear 'em chat 'bout battyman / Mi nah wanna hear 'em chat 'bout burn dem / no, no".
Down in the basement, there was a smaller crowd at this point, but I couldn't think of anyone better to have playing at an all-ages show as a kick-ass inspiration for the youth. Ultimately, my only mild complaint might be that the band's name is a little misleading — if anything, they were concrete and specific. I look forward to catching them again.4
Listen to a track from this set here.
After the energy of that set, Army Girls brought a different sort of excellence that felt like a refreshing cool-down to end the matinée. As Carmen Elle (guit, vox) and Andy Smith (drums) set up, people in the crowd grabbed chairs and pulled them up close to create an impromptu intimate setting. Powered by her tremendously expressive vocals, Carmen Elle's songs contain all the hallmarks of mature craftswomanship — even when they're quick, each one feels satisfyingly complete. As the pair played through their small catalogue — when one of the friends in the crowd called out "One more!" at set's end after six songs the response from the stage was, "we don't have any more" — each song was dedicated to one of the assembled friends. Warm and inviting, the only flaw here is indeed that the crowd was left wanting more.5
Listen to a track from this set here.
What a vital part of the musical ecosphere! While the media were dropping by to investigate and ultimately write some good thinkpieces on the topic, I'm glad there people putting shows like these together — here's hoping there's more on the horizon.
1 I don't see any live dates on the horizon, but Nicholas Doubleyou has a new digital single available to stream on his bandcamp.
2 Formerly of The Miles, Laurence seems to have also seemed to have found his own semi-rehearsed-chaos-is-better sweet spot with a new project called Hellaluya.
3 The band has a string of out-of-town dates with Odonis Odonis during September's weekends, so keep an eye out for them to come to your town soon.
4 The band's Dis rupt dis reality mixtape (and a whole bunch more) is available as a free download at their bandcamp. Recommended!
5 Excitingly, the band's debut EP Close To the Bone is coming out on Blocks Record Club on September 13, 2011. There's no release show planned yet as far as I know, but they are playing The Drake Hotel on Saturday, September 10 with The Darcys, Samantha Savage Smith and Rival Boys.
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