GroovyStylie!

White Denim (Austin, TX), Brazos (Austin, TX) @ Club Congress

by Charlie Bertsch

If ever there were an album begging for elucidation in a live setting, it’s White Denim’s latest offering Fits. Although many of the tracks are immediately compelling on an individual basis, the record is difficult to comprehend as a whole. Even after listening to it for several hours on auto-repeat, as I putter about the house, I still find myself forgetting what band I’m listening to at several junctures.

White Denim

It’s a real struggle to discern the tie that binds songs like “I Start To Run,” which has the quirky bounce of a Primus number, “Sex Prayer”, which sounds like Tortoise covering Ege Bamyasi-era Can, and Paint Yourself,” one of the best M. Ward songs you’ll never hear on an M. Ward album. Not to mention that the one thing Fits does manage to pull off consistently is a rejection of the gritty garage sound that made its earlier work on the much-praised Workout Holiday leap out of the speakers.

As I waited for the band’s Club Congress show to commence, still soothed by the impressively cohesive sound of opening act Brazos, I kept thinking of a clever old saw: “If you don’t stand for something, you’re going to fall for anything.” In going for a more polished feel on Fits without coming up with a unifying style or concept, White Denim seemed to have lost touch with the attitude that made them so compelling in the first place. Or so I mused as I stood on the wrong side of the net that the venue uses to separate drinkers from underage concert-goers, holding two bottles of beer. The fact that the band spent an inordinate amount of time doing a sound check wasn’t helping my mood, either.

But then the band started to play in earnest and all – except Club Congress, as I’ll explain below – was forgiven. While I wouldn’t say that White Denim reverted to their pre-Fits sound, exactly, the references to Nuggets-era psychedelia suppressed on the new offering were restored to prominence, albeit alongside the more varied repertoire evinced in their new songs. After a time, I developed the impression that the concert was a kind of palimpsest, with the Fits material overlaid – sometimes literally – on top of a more Monterey Pop-friendly base.

White Denim

Unlike most bands, White Denim treats its recorded material, not as songs to be reproduced more or less as-is in a live setting, but as routines that can be recontextualized in a variety of ways. The trio’s extraordinary facility for playing difficult music fast and in a way that exudes the fun of improvisation makes this unorthodox approach work. Some of the suite-like songs on Fits – which are almost as internally disjunctive as the whole album feels – provided spare parts to drop into crowd-pleasing older numbers and some of the riffs off Workout Holiday were snuck in to the Fits material that they played relatively straight.

It was a remarkable achievement, creating a sense of cohesion at a conceptual register. The closest approximation I can recall from the annals of my own show-going past, interestingly, is the Butthole Surfers – like White Denim, a Texas band – who had the power to help listeners perceive the “negative space” in traditional rock songs. White Denim is less trippy, perhaps, but in live performance has more in common with that storied act’s mind-bending approach than with superficially similar current-day bands like Animal Collective.

White Denim

Of course, some of the “praise” for the extreme freedom of White Denim’s performance should probably be directed at Club Congress, which refused to let the late-starting headliners play the set they’d intended. Aside from the “cage” at all-ages shows, there’s nothing more annoying about the way the venue handles live music than its insistence on ending shows early enough to permit a DJ night afterwards. Thankfully, White Denim was clever enough to turn their “last song” into a kind of medley that approached EP length. Still, the bliss instilled by that highlight did not make me forget that I would much rather have seen them play at Plush.

I understand full well that Congress needs to make money. And I love the place too much to stop going, even though I am often disappointed by the experience of being there for anything other than food and drink. But the graceless way in which the purveyors tried to move things along during White Denim’s set, culminating in a dimming of the stage lights, left a really bad taste in my mouth. Can’t the bridge-and-tunnel crowd waiting outside for the DJ night just use the slight delay to adjust hair and make-up or toddle off to the loo for an 80s-style Coke and a smile?

White Denim – ShakeShakeShake MP3

Brazos – Day Glo MP3

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down (San Francisco, CA), Portland Cello Project (Portland, OR) @ Plush

The atmosphere prior to Thao With The Get Down Stay Down’s November 18th set at Plush was electric. Tucson is the sort of place where crowds frequently shrink by the time the headliners go on. But no one was leaving before the talented Thao Nguyen and her bandmates Adam and Wills Thompson hit the stage. “I’ve been waiting for this forever!” shouted one woman as she launched into a pre-prandial pogo. “I can’t believe how excited I am,” offered another. Clearly, this wasn’t going to be the musical equivalent of a wine-tasting. The audience wasn’t there to sample, but to gorge.

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down

The ease with which people can learn about new music these days and the perpetually fragmenting “public” to which such accessibility leads has radically transformed the experience of up-and-coming musicians on tour. Whereas the primary goal was once to simply make a good impression, artists must now minister as well to the expectations of audience members who already know the words to every song. Even a band’s first tour can feel like a repeat performance.  While the sense of camaraderie generated by such familiarity can be a powerful source of sustenance, it also increases the pressure to please. Disappointing those who consider themselves “friends”, even in the low-intensity Facebook meaning of the word, is different from failing to impress strangers.

That pressure can undo even the most talented performers. And it might seem that Thao Nguyen, who has to sing and play complicated guitar parts , would be especially prone to its effects. There’s a brilliantly unstructured quality to her band’s two Kill Rock Stars albums, the sort of tossed-off sound that is much harder to reproduce live than more overtly polished records. Somehow, though, despite the more limited aural palette available in a concert setting, Thao and her bandmates managed to outdo their albums.

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down

Was this a case of addition by subtraction? In part, perhaps. Still, the main reason why the band not only met their eager fan base’s expectations at Plush, but easily exceeded them is that Thao Nguyen has the sort of presence that no amount of practice can teach. She’s got the proverbial “it” made famous by Clara Bow. Yet although she is an attractive woman who sings songs, especially on the band’s last album Know Better Learn Faster that circle around the topic of romance, her appeal is not really sex appeal.

Or maybe it’s that she transposes what we think of as sex appeal into a register where it pushes buttons that have become sticky with disuse. One of the highlights of the concert was the song “When We Swam,” which features the injunction, “Bring your hips to me.” The fact that she’s a woman singing that line gives it enough of a twist – hips, after all, being a part of the body stereotypically identified with female sexuality – that it complicates listeners’ sense of power relations. Thao reinforced this effect live by mock insisting that her male bandmates do a silly hip-swinging dance. It was light-hearted moment, but one that still conveyed a serious point.

Another way in which the Plush show enhanced the band’s songs was to bring out textures in Thao’s singing and guitar-playing that their two albums downplay. Consistency of sound is a sensible goal, especially for an artist trying to make a name for herself, but the chameleon-like quality of her twin modes of expression is a strength that deserves to be more sharply delineated on future releases. The fact that she can channel Patti Smith, Kristin Hersh, Cat Power and sometimes even Lou Reed  — in her breathy semi-speaking delivery — is remarkably impressive, as is fretwork that glides seamlessly from skiffle to samba, all routed through the same roots rock filter that The Smiths’ Johnny Marr popularized. When you have that special quality that Thao exudes in abundance, revealing your influences only underscores the novelty of the finished product.    –Charlie Bertsch <cbertsch@gmail.com>

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down

Portland Cello Project

Portland Cello Project

Adam Thompson lends a hand to Portland Cello Project

Thao and the Get Down Stay Down – When We Swam MP3

Dinosaur Jr. (Amherst, MA), Lou Barlow & The Missingmen (Los Angeles and San Pedro, CA), Violent Soho (Mansfield, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia) @ Marquee Theater

Some performers make their shows memorable by sheer force of personality. From the exuberance of Bruce Springsteen to the ambivalence of Bob Dylan they accentuate their stage presence. Dinosaur Jr. takes the exact opposite approach. If there were an antonym for the word “emote,” their presentation would serve as its dictionary definition. It might seem curious, then, that many of the people leaving the band’s November 3^rd, 2009 concert in Tempe, Arizona’s Marquee Theater were excitedly declaiming that it was one of the best shows they had ever seen. Somehow, in holding back Dinosaur Jr. managed to give their all.

Dinosaur Jr.

When the band first rose to prominence in the alternative rock scene of the late 1980s, they were frequently grouped together with other distortion-loving acts like the Jesus and Mary Chain, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and Nirvana. Critics tried to make sense of these artists’ seemingly counter-intuitive approach to melody, producing songs that would be the envy of the Brill Building were it not for the fact that they were submerged in torrents of noise.

Dinosaur Jr. were the hardest band to fathom of the entire set. Studiously avoiding irony in their songwriting and far more indebted to classic rock than those contemporaries, they nevertheless opted for a high-decibel presentation that made seeing their shows outright painful. This impulse to dress sincerity up in a winter storm’s worth of protective gear inspired all manner of analyses back in the heyday of alternative rock. Some inclined towards sociology, discerning generational wariness on the part of twenty-somethings tired of being told that their culture would never measure up to the Golden Age of the late 1960s. Others took a more psychological approach, describing the reluctance to permit beauty to be beautiful as passive-aggressive.

As compelling as such analyses might have seemed, however, they overlooked a crucial component of the noise rock experience. Just as people prefer to get gifts wrapped up in paper and bows, they seem to find concealed charms especially appealing. The mere fact that Dinosaur Jr. continues to draw enthusiastic crowds in its third decade of performing suggests that what might at first seem like hostility towards their audience is actually the best kind of tough love. Indeed, it could be argued that the band’s lack of stage presence and ear-bashing volume represent a deliberate attempt to bring scrutiny to the music at the expense of all else.

Dinosaur Jr.

*          *          *

Musical reunions are hard to pull off. Although they promise a return to familiar pleasures, the vast majority fall well short of that goal. Instead of transporting you back to the comforts of home, the best they can do is to reconstruct it as a stage set, making the props on display stand in for the rest. It’s like watching your divorced parents play nice at your wedding, smiling together in family portraits as if the rancor between them had just been a bad dream. No matter how hard fans try to ignore what is missing, using the force of their nostalgia to flesh out details in their minds, the effect of this forced goodwill is still uncanny. You want to believe that the camaraderie is real, but the impulse to listen for false notes is hard to resist.

That’s why, as word first spread that the alternative rock band Dinosaur Jr.’s original line-up was reforming back in 2005, most of their fans were counting the days until it would end badly. Even in the best of times, it had never been an equal partnership. J Mascis not only wrote and sang most of the band’s songs, he also tightly scripted the parts played by bassist Lou Barlow and drummer Murph. Because Mascis continued to release material under the “Dinosaur Jr.” name for years after their departure, the mere idea of a reunion struck many people as strange. This wasn’t a case of a band like The Beatles, in which each member had a prominent role, getting back together. Indeed, if a band is like a marriage, Dinosaur Jr. had seemed like one doomed from the start.

Still, even if few fans had faith that the reunion would last, the fact that Barlow had managed to achieve considerable success with other projects, such as Sebadoh and The Folk Implosion, after parting ways with Mascis made it an exciting prospect. As an added bonus, several of the songs on Sebadoh’s breakthrough record III, including the scathing “The Freed Pig,” had clearly been fueled by Barlow’s rancor towards his former bandmate. If nothing else, the Dinosaur Jr. tour promised an opportunity to see how long a dysfunctional relationship could be sustained under the pressures of the road.

Longer than almost anyone thought, as it turned out. Not only have Dinosaur Jr. toured widely since their reunion tour was announced, they also released a critically lauded album Beyond in 2007 and then managed to put out another, Farm, in 2009 that was, if anything, even better received. Making this improbable longevity even more improbable  – after all, the original line-up only lasted a few years to begin with – is the fact that Barlow and Murph have made it clear that Mascis is still calling the shots. Clearly, something must have happened to make them willing to subordinate their wills to his.

Dinosaur Jr.

Although financial concerns surely played a role – band members can make more money playing under the “Dinosaur Jr.” banner than they can on their own – the music business is in such poor shape that it can hardly be called a case of selling out. On the contrary, the motivation for staying together seems to be the conviction that autonomy is less important solidarity. The same reasons to break up that existed in 1988 still exist today, to an extent. But dwelling on negatives doesn’t seem to be as high a priority.

If  Beyond or Farm were like most reunion or comeback records, this would be the perfect següe for a backhanded compliment. “Sure, the band may not be what it once was, but we’re happy enough to have them back together that nitpicking would be counter-productive.” The reason this critical approach doesn’t work with these reunion albums is that although Dinosaur Jr. may not have been what they once seemed to be in their early years, they definitely are now. That is to say, this is one of those extremely rare cases in which a band only became a functional musical marriage after the divorce.

*          *          *

It’s almost impossible to imagine a Dinosaur Jr. fan disliking the sound of the reunion records. Everything that made their 1980s albums exciting is present, as well as the innovations that J Mascis introduced in the 1990s after Barlow and Murph had been shunted aside. But there is one crucial difference between the new material and the music on Your Living All Over Me and Bug: it doesn’t make the same detour through memory. Sure, a longtime Dinosaur Jr. fan can listen to the post-reunion albums in the grip of nostalgia for the band’s classic sound. But the flood of associations triggered by songs like “The Lung” and “Get Me” and “Freak Scene” will be missing.

Of course, this is a problem that all artists with lengthy careers face. Whether you’re Bob Dylan or Gang of Four, your recent records are structurally incapable of evoking the complex personal responses of ones that fans have been listening to for decades. It doesn’t matter how good they are, in the end, because what they lack has nothing to do with the music. This is why folks rush out to get the latest release by their favorite classic rock or punk artists only to be disappointed because they can’t purchase the texture of remembrance. It also explains the enormous pressure audiences exert on performers to reprise their old hits.

Predictably, then, Dinosaur Jr.’s set at the Marquee witnessed an ebb and flow of concertgoers’ investment as

Dinosaur Jr.

post-reunion songs gave way to the best-known material from their back catalogue. For older members of the audience, who had been listening to their records for years or perhaps even seen them live back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, this dynamic made sense. The odd part was that the teens and twenty-somethings that made up a sizable percentage of the crowd demonstrated the same response. Somehow they knew when to nod in stunned admiration for J Mascis’s guitar-playing, when to sing along and when to push their bodies into overdrive as an expression of bliss.

More impressively, many of them seemed to understand that they were caught up in a paradoxical experience. True lovers of the band periodically wish for the volume to be turned down, so that the songs’ melodicism can be fully appreciated. But they also want the volume turned up, so that brute force pulverizes all traces of delicacy. The brilliance of Dinosaur Jr. lies in those contradictory desires., which were fully mobilized at the Marquee.

–Charlie Bertsch <cbertsch@gmail.com>