siberian, holy fuck!, wolf parade at neumo’s
I can totally sympathize with those who strategically try to arrive at a show at the exact moment that the headliner takes the stage, but sometimes if you show up early you can luck into seeing openers that absolutely kill. Such was the case at Neumo’s on Saturday night.
:: Siberian ::
more photos from the show [flickr]
I spent most of Siberian’s set astonished at just how good they were and baffled by who they reminded me of. Had I heard them before? Do I own their CD? Now I remember that their lush shoegazy guitars probably sounded so familiar because I listened to a few songs on their website a couple weeks ago when I saw that they were playing with Wolf Parade.
Finn Parnell’s vocals occasionally got lost in the mix, but that seemed pretty o.k. since their music is more about cascading waves of pretty simmering guitars, their interplay, and eventual roaring climaxes. He also forgot bandmate Zach Tillman’s birthday, but any minor tension resulting from this oversight was quickly remedied with a shot of whiskey as the band moved on to satisfy the shouted requests from the audience (”… some songs are good, and some songs we play in the middle.”) as they led to a crowd pleasing finale. Now, instead of wondering who they sounds like, I’m going to switch to being puzzled over why they aren’t a little more famous.
:: Holy Fuck! ::
An exclamatory expletive name is a tough hurdle for a band to set for themselves in the expectations department. But in the face of two tables filled with plugs, cables, pedals, all sorts of gagetry and four guys, I repeatedly did find myself thinking “holy fuck!” as the relentless and spazzy dance music overwhelmed the defenses of at least the front half of the club.
Samantha, who often has trouble with lyrically-free music started imagining them as what would happen if M83 & Junior Boys had a baby who grew up with Explosions in the Sky and played electronic Battleship in their community center rec room. While I saw where she was coming from, I just thought that the Toronto quartet was making the sort of rave soundtrack that would have played over the massive party scene in one of those Matrix sequels if all of the people who escaped the evil robot simulacrum were music nerds instead of computer geeks with too much time for philosophizing on their hands.
A stage littered with casios of various flavors (often swapped quickly within songs), a seemingly bottomless suitcase stuffed with musical toys (including a melodica, a fisher price telephone) was complemented by live guitar and drums (I’m a sucker for this live percussion over beats every time). Without a laptop to be seen, the athletic on-the-fly mixing, complete with screams into a tiny microphone, keyboard swaps, worked into a nonstop dance and jumping performance was all the more jaw-dropping and show-stealing.
:: Wolf Parade ::
With rumors of a new album on the horizon to follow up 2005’s magnificent Apologies to the Queen Mary, Wolf Parade’s show was bound to be a great place to get a sneak preview of new material. Sure enough, Dan Boeckner opened by saying “we’re going to play a bunch of songs that we haven’t played before” and the band proceeded to play a set heavily dominated by tracks destined for release maybe next spring that sounded like a logical, if slightly less noisy, progression. Even the rowdier members of the audience were mildly supportive of the new stuff, despite repeated and annoying track requests.
My primary experience with listening to music is as a private soundtrack, usually on headphones; so a great part about going to a show is exploding that hermetic experience by sharing a room with a bunch of other fans who are thrilled to be in the company of a beloved band. Yet, occasionally, this experience has the opposite effect and I find myself wondering what the fuck is going on when fellow fans turn out to include people who shove their way to the front, stepping on toes along the way, throw sweaters on stage, pump fists recklessly, appear to be on the brink of fights throughout, seem not to have bathed regularly, and yell track numbers as setlist demands. It was some comfort that the band seemed equally befuddled by this reception, making a running joke of being expected to act as a live jukebox to overly intoxicated people at the edge of the stage.
Luckily, the side benefit of hearing a lot of new music was that these songs also served to keep a certain contingent in check between the wildness triggered by the likes of “Sons & Daughters of Holy Ghosts”, “Modern World”, “Disco Sheets”, and “I am a Runner”. Aside from the absence of the theremin [insert sad emoticon of choice here], it was a really good performance and the band (again) claims that it’s their best Seattle show [mb], chiding Sub Pop for not showing up to catch it. (Later, someone in the back identified themselves as being from the label).
I’ll admit that at one point, I worried that my old-fogey grumpiness at the crowd and being repeatedly hit by an oblivious willowy hippie dancer and her backpack threatened to outweigh my enjoyment of Wolf Parade’s accomplished show. But then, they closed with a fourteen minute long epic, complete with lengthy instrumental flourishes and I was sold again. By the time they came back out for an encore, playing “This Heart’s On Fire” and “I’ll Believe in Anything” [.mov]—a pair of songs that helped to saved my fragile sanity during an eight-hour early winter layover as I listened to them over and over again, riding the moving sidewalk along the terminal until I was convinced that the latter was somehow a commentary on the Isreal–Palestine situation—I, too, found myself among the bouncing singing along masses, feeling the tug of my arm reaching for the ceiling.
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I missed Siberian, but Holy Fuck lived up to their name.
Funny, we were close to the back for Wolf Parade (next to the Sub Pop contingent) and I didn’t hear these drunken hecklers at all. I was wondering why they kept joking about about the track numbers. Maybe it was my luck in being isolated from the drunk obnoxious/twirling hippie crowd, but I was blown away by their show. They were right that it was better than the past couple times I’ve seen them here. And the new material sounded really, really good.