all photos: Roberto Madruga
I wish we all could be California… girls?
Something like that.
Tuesday night I dove right into my element. With two bands from LA, and one worthy of LA (via Brooklyn), I felt the closest to home I have in a good while. All the young dudes were sure to groove out gnarly epic weirdo-psych-punk danceable jams that would keep my whip-lashed neck thrashed for the next week. Butter!!
I’ve been just plainly stoked on this 3-band bill for a long while. Having seen Abe Vigoda a while back at The Smell, I’ve effectively been pumping this band as the next big thing ever since. I’d long ago fallen in love with the singer from High Places, and No Age is No Age. They’re big time.
Getting right down to it:
Abe Vigoda is a band that sounds akin to Paul Simon being pumped through the 12 inch subwoofers of a 1964 Chevy Impala driven through Nigerian back roads. Loud, dirty, and devoutly poly-rhythmic, one might find the comparisons to Vampire Weekend a bit of a stretch, but the afro-pop inspirations are certainly there. Instead of “Upper West Side Soweto,” however, these dudes evoke more of an “East L.A. Soweto” vibe. Hailing from the same art/music collective “Smell” scene as like-minded HEALTH, Mika Miko, Foot Village, Lavender Diamond, The Mae Shi, IMA GYMNIST, etc. (how many others can I rep to the fullest?), the very young dudes of Vigoda have assumed a little brother/big brother relationship with their mentors/album publishers No Age, supporting them throughout their first nation-wide headlining tour.
Coming to us on the night they released their first album, “Skeleton,” and forced to sort through some technical difficulties in the pre-show sound check, the show got off to a start about an hour late. Luckily for AV, this made for a fairly packed house when they hit the stage to kick off the jams. Plowing through many of the songs on their new record, Abe lays angular, rhythmic guitar lines over bouncy bass riffs and cross-polinated drum accents to put forth a sound that is strongest when you can hear all elements of the equation. Unfortunately, the interplay between the instrumentation and the lead vocals wasn’t always evident, and their delay-addled, bright, Televison inspired guitar work sounded a bit muddy. Still, their high energy approach to songs like “Bear Face,” “Animal Ghosts,” and “Dead City/Waste Wilderness” left the heart and ears wanting more. Look for them to continue to provide for years to come.
High Places hit the stage running and surrounded themselves with drum machines, KAOS pads, loop pedals, sample banks, and trigger pads. One male, one female, the duo laid live rhythmic groundwork, looped it, warped it, sequenced it, then dropped it hard on our backbones. Moving our feet and our souls to the ambient grooves, Mary Pearson would then sing tenderly over the melodia, creating smallish and delicate psychedelic jungle-disco soliloquies. Evoking a definite cherub-like spirit, one was inspired to groove or just generally sway in line with what several might describe as the toddler-dance. The set sent me on a cosmic journey of the dearest kind, accompanied by the thumps, clicks, clings, and calming reverb drenched vocals likely inspired by a place higher than I.
And from that other ageless, timeless place of consciously clichéd dreams and post-self-awareness come the men of No Age. Call it nostalgia, call it a third meaning, but for whatever reason, I am entirely unable to separate the music and aesthetic of these gents from the city I know and love so well. Blending a healthy optimism, atmospheric guitar hooks, cacophonic punk-rock drumming, and melodies made purposefully obscure, No Age embodies the best of the shiny and sun-addled heater known as Los Angeles.
Morphing distorted guitar shredders into semi-shoegazy loops and calculated and potent dynamic shifts, Dean and Randy have created a sound indebted to their West Coast punk rock forebearers, their surf-rocking grandfathers, and their contemporary weirdo rippers. And god is it beautiful. The beauty lies in its simplicity and its inherent vitality. Most impressive is their ability to create an inescapable wave of sound constructed entirely from two dudes and a bunch of pedals. Playing a healthy mix of tunes from the collection of EPs that made up “Weirdo Rippers” and several songs from their debut album “Nouns,” No Age revved the fully crowded house into a pulsing fervor. Most songs clock in at 2 minutes, leaving the mini-moshers in a constant state of anticipation.
Songs like the crowd favorite/newly introduced MTV video phenomenon “Eraser,” “Dead Plane,” “Teen Creeps,” and closer “Everybody’s Down” showcased the band’s ability to cloak really good pop songs into blasts of perfectly distorted melody. Anyhow, you either by into the ideological romanticism crafted so apparently effortlessly by these gents or you don’t. Sort of like my hometown. I love L.A., I love these dudes, and my only gripe is that shows like these need to be truly unending and without time - ageless.
Just picked up Skeleton from emusic - good stuff!
July 11, 2008 at 12:29 pm