There Is No Cat - School night

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Thursday, September 30, 2010

School night

I did something I rarely do last night; I went out to see music on a school night. Maxwell's had a triple bill put on by WFMU: Italian fuzz-psych-garage quartet Vermillion Sands, who I had never heard of, Dump, the solo project of James McNew, bass player for Yo La Tengo, and New Zealand legends The Clean. I'll be honest, if it had just been The Clean, I probably would have stayed home, which will sound like blasphemy to some of my long-time Kiwimusiphile friends. But the real draw for me here was Dump. James doesn't come out with records very often, and he doesn't really tour Dump; he's pretty busy with his day job, after all. Dump's set was short, only 30 minutes, but it was a perfectly distilled nugget of awesomeness. His songs often start slow and build in layers, like a new wave equivalent of Steve Reich or John Adams, and that worked really well on stage, with the help of some kind of looping sampler that let him lay down the basics and add pieces gradually. I think my favorite on this was "Daily Affirmation" from Dump's most recent album, 2003's A Grown-Ass Man. It starts with about 30 seconds of chaos and gradually assembles into something that makes sense. The trip from baffling to wonderful takes about ten minutes all in all. This video from 2008 is pretty close to what the song sounded like last night. Ira's not the only guitar shredder in Yo La Tengo. A+.

The Clean seemed a little off last night. I've seen them probably four times over the years, and this was easily the worst. That said, much like sex, bad Clean is better than good anything else. I don't know what the problem was. It might have been a bad mix; The Clean is a sturdy platform put up by Robert Scott (bass) and Hamish Kilgour (drums) for David Kilgour (guitars and organ) to build mountains of sound on. But there were a lot of points at which you could hardly hear David's guitar, at least where I was standing. Even when you could, it often lacked the bite of Kilgour's best guitar work. Borrowed guitar and amp, maybe? Or maybe the band's just Getting Older. I never expect them to be tight; the ramshackle nature of their performances is expected given that one member lives in New York and the other two in New Zealand, and usually it's charming. It didn't bother me that songs kind of fell apart at the end rather than coming to a full stop all at once. But something was just off last night. Even the encore closer, "Point That Thing Somewhere Else", wasn't the usual rouser that it is. I know the band likes to mess with their songs; I even have a copy of "Point That Thing" where the main melody is done on piano, and the bite of the song survives that. Even with all that, it was a solid B perfomance.

Vermillion Sands, who opened, were a band I'd never heard of. I thought they did a good job winning over the crowd with their catchy songs. I bought their CD from their singer after the show, so I must have thought they were pretty good. They'd fit right in on Little Steven's Underground Garage. B+/A-.

I was dragging this morning, but made it through the day without falling asleep, so I guess I'm not as old as I felt at 6:53 this morning when I woke up (53 minutes late and I still made the last express train into the city and got to work at my usual time).

Now listening to: "Monsoon Blues" from Vermillion Sands by Vermillion Sands.

Tags: maxwells the clean vermillion sands dump hoboken

Posted at 9:29 PM

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