Protest Your Indifference: An Evening with Yeasayer and Ponytail
Indie four-piece Yeasayer is rising through the ranks of upcoming bands, something that seems mostly propelled by the success of the splendid ‘2080′ track from their ‘All Hour Cymbals’ CD, something the band will be circumnavigating the states through May before heading off to Europe to promote.
They’re an unusual looking group. A lanky, long-haired guitarist and bassist flanked the spastic, more typical looking indie frontman. The drummer was hidden behind the amps. They had just been in DC in February, playing a sold out set at the Black Cat the day before the Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings show. DC was the first stop of their new tour and We played it smart this time around, buying tickets well in advance of the show, though this early April Thursday night set didn’t achieve the same numbers in audience as the February show. Though, it’s hard to account for everyone considering the numbers of people who tend to lounge downstairs during the set while the faithful pull their beers from the bars and head up to surround the stage and see the bands they paid the admission to see. Even just counting these, the turnout was considerable large.
The first band were young; questionably above the drinking age for sure. The lead singer was short, her voice a piercing pitch of squeal. Her stage manner seemed autistic, she would kind of bounce up and down and hold her mouth open between lyrics, staring at the ceiling like she was focusing her eyes and was continuously mesmerized by whatever she saw. She was flanked by the guitarists, one hidden by a stack of amps at the corner of the stage. The other, a skinny, energetic baby-faced Asian kid with an almost-mushroom bob haircut. From where we sat, I could only muster a half-decent view of their drummer. He reminded me of the pictures of bands out of the 80s you find in books on punk history. He was think and had a head full of curly hair, and he looked like a throwback to the nerdy looking players of Blondie (outside of Chris Stein). I couldn’t tell if he was wearing a pair of Chuck Taylors.
They introduced themselves as Ponytail, a four-piece from Baltimore. Yeasayer’s lead singer couldn’t stress enough how “nice” they were. “They make Mother Theresa and Obama look like assholes,” he joked and the audience laughed at the sentiment, though he could see it couldn’t stretch on for too long. “Okay, I’m going to shut up and play. Yeah… DC politics” and he trailed off before Yeasayer gradually broke full swing back into another song.
The crowd of bland looking hipsters that typify the Black Cat audiences didn’t know what to make of Ponytail. It certainly took some audio adjustments to tolerate the high pitched vocalist. She reminded me of Marnie Stern without the hypnotic fretboard tapping, but her lyrics were drowned in the volume of the instruments that encircled her. After a while, she came into introductions of songs with trills, accompanied by her energetic guitarist. It was noise, pure noise, and by then, it didn’t sound like there were any real words to form lyrics. But as bizarre as the display might have been, they knew how to just have fun with the music. It was goofy and it was spirited, and even if you couldn’t sing along, it was certainly enough to make you go berserk if so willing. Unfortunately, other than those on the fringes of the crowd, you couldn’t find it in the audiences. How is this the same city that helped define hardcore? This, the same club that hosted supposedly riotous performances of bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat when they started out?! This “history” is starting to feel more like a myth. Or frankly, just a tremendous lie.
The folksie blends that has come to define the underground have grown incredibly tiresome in recent months, to the point that going to another show and seeing a pair of pale young men with Amish beards and trucker hats whining through ballads of cynicism make you want to just unzip your skin and step out; the kind of saturation that has people just dying for something new. The time is long overdue. But where pretension had bred a form of rock n’ roll stripped down to its essence, not just in sound, but purpose (quite simply to just make music that was fun to listen to and just as fun to watch), now is as good a time as any to embrace that musical response once again. Only, I’m not sure we can have any kind of revolution with these boring white kids at the helm?!
Maybe it was just the wrong audience. This band seemed suitable for the nonchalance of younger listeners. Maybe people more the age of those performing whereas those around us fall under the dream-crushing classifications of “young professionals” and the routine of inked arms and unkempt hair becomes hidden behind the facade of weekday business-casual attire. The only trouble is an alternative is hard to find. On the one hand, bands like these, unless more widely recognized acts, don’t tend to frequent the stages of DC. And more importantly, neither do many of the audiences who might find that kind of speed, energy, and simple desire to really have fun with the bands on the stages before them, don’t really exist around here. And although I adore going to shows, this is the one thing about the music scene in DC I truly hate. But is it limited to just this region, I wonder? The opposite extremes I remember existing in the smaller venues around Orlando, but this was at least five to ten years ago. And I haven’t been to enough shows around Baltimore to make some informed conclusion about it.
We didn’t stay long into the Yeasayer set, the unfortunate consequence of taking the train to the show and last trains out being far before the end of the show. It’s different for weekday all-ages shows because, as I once found out from a surprisingly short Rilo Kiley performance, they adhere to the city curfew. But here, we love our sale of beer and scorn the kids for it!
Yeasayer has been gaining a considerable following these days, cropping up on numerous annual “Best Of” lists of indie bands. I had mostly judged them on the basis of “2080,” and judging by the spontaneous liveliness of the audience when they played it about twenty minutes into the set, it was the track everyone else was most familiar with, too. But their other songs seemed much different, almost new age, but not in the embarrassing sense. The keyboard and guitar introduction on the first song of the set reminded me of the less cumbersome introductions to Tangerine Dream songs. Other tracks, with melodic layered vocals of the guitarist, keyboardist, and bassist standing at the front of the stage and almost orchestral power of the instrumentals felt like 1970s rock, but lacking in the guitar solos. The first hour of the performance wasn’t bad, and it seemed at least strangely attractive enough to finally get these hipsters to move, almost to the point of being as frightfully synchronized as an audience at a Christian Rock concert. Unfortunately, however, despite some delicious qualities in the music, “2080″ seemed to offer the only variation between songs.
Yeasayer seems to have a shy stage presence. Or at least they seem most comfortable if just left to play their instruments, though they did break once to make a joke and remind audiences how nice Ponytail was when one of its members jumped onstage during a Yeasayer song to help repair something. But otherwise, they don’t seem beholden to much of the dramatics, even the entertaining ones, of being on stage. The obligatory casual aloofness of the band at the end of the set who seems to acquiesce to the audience cheers and shouts for an encore was instead replaced with the promise of one song before leaving the stage for good that night.
(yeasayer – 2080)
