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)

Jam Session: An Evening With The Black Angels

Tone, Spindrift and the Black Angels @ the Rock n’ Roll Hotel

The owner of the recent line of H Street venues/bars might have envisioned the new businesses as an eventual impetus of a thriving entertainment district. Even a name like Rock n’ Roll Hotel might invoke expectations of grandeur-perhaps a renovated 1920s hotel with a wide stage area and balcony; something catering to big name acts and pricey tickets, competing with arenas but with the additional benefit of atmosphere. But in fact, the Rock n’ Roll Hotel, along with its sister establishments the Red & Black and the unusual Playhouse of Wonders offer reasonable ticket prices and the District’s usual semi-bohemian atmosphere: tacky decoration and black-clad hipsters, but not the cheap beer or food that would might afford it the quality of an absolute dive. Regardless, the H Street experiment suffers from location. It is inconvenient to the metro and surrounded by little more than all-hours omnibus fast food options, offering little incentive to the frequent show attendant whose mental map of DC rarely includes anything beyond the northwest corridor.

Although still just as much a stage to local and unknown musicians, the Rock n’ Roll Hotel competes with U Street’s Black Cat and the quick-selling 9:30 Club to host more visible performers. The Black Angels, psychedelic rockers of Austin, Texas (featured in the second issue of Montag), headlined a Sunday night bill in early November that also included the DC-based seven piece, Tone, and the California psychedelic rock outfit, Spindrift. Waiting for the box office to open, AC and I sat at the sparsely populated upstairs bar with bottles of Yuengling. Winged guitars lined the ceiling. Cattle skulls assembled to various bodies attached to the wall behind the bar resembled something from a bad horror movie or the contempo-creepy, nonsense art exhibits at PS-1 in New York. Behind the pool tables were two partially partitioned rooms where the decoration looked to be inspired by scenes from Clue and hodge-podge methods of contest-style DIY-décor shows. Spindrift’s lead singer sat nearby hunched over a mixed drink. His face was hidden by unruly hair and a thick mustache and he wore a black blazer covered in a simple moon and star motif. Passing him earlier in the hallway, he plainly said with uncertain sarcasm “It’s good to be back in DC.”

Watching Tone, the first opening act, felt like the first-hand observation of basement band practice. The band, comprised of almost all shapeless men, all dressed in black shirts, looked like an army of daytime IT professionals. On the small stage, the guitarists formed a half-circle around two full drum-kits, although the energetic drum duo contrasted with the lethargic guitarists (except the bassist). The music was structured on odd chords and tempo changes and tensions among some of the guitarists became apparent during missed cues and incorrect chord changes. No one spoke during the fully instrumental set until they were finished and one of the guitarists announced the band’s name as they immediately began packing their instruments.

Between sets, AC and I gave up waiting for the kitchen to open and scouted the streets for food options, although the nearest place open after nine on a Sunday night was Rainbow City, one of the omnibus fast food joints typical to northeastern DC. The awning advertisement of a menu consisting of seafood, subs, Chinese food, burgers and pizza can make even a sober stomach churn from thoughts of the less-than-sanitary food factory behind its doors. The place is built like a bank, with a British-system rotating ordering window and thick panes of Plexiglas which might seem like an effective protection from potential gun-wielding intruders were it not for the pesky detail of the flimsy side door that delivery drivers pass through.

I would learn later that the two men awaiting their orders alongside us were guitarists from the Black Angels. The blond asked me where he could buy cigarettes and a neighborhood man standing to order offered directions to the gas station convenient store. The dark haired musician was finishing his conversation about going into a K-Mart before Halloween and hearing Christmas music, which made him feel like stabbing someone. I noticed the same thing while in an arts and crafts store on Halloween weekend. The two musicians finally got their orders of Chinese food and inspected the paper bags for accuracy, the conversation now moving to Thanksgiving. The dark haired musician said he didn’t need a day to obligate thankfulness when he felt that way everyday. When they left, I stood awkwardly waiting for my food when the neighborhood man said to me, “Can you believe that? He hates Thanksgiving. I bet his favorite holiday is Halloween.” I laughed and nodded politely, amused by the strangely angsty conversation. When AC came back from the ATM, we went back to the car to eat like cops on stakeout.

Queasy from my half smoke and fries mistake, we returned to the Rock n’ Roll Hotel before Spindrift took to the stage. We ordered beers and lounged near the pool tables. In the far corner, an older black man danced near the jukebox as it played some funk-soul track. And when the thumping of guitar and drum sound-checks came through the floor, we made our way downstairs to the stage area, the audience now beginning to crowd the small venue. Girls in long flowing skirts and denim jackets stood alongside generic guys with drab t-shirts and vintage locks-this recreation of the hippie being appropriate for the psychedelic rock schemes of Spindrift and the Black Angels.

In recordings, the two revivalist bands appear divergent. Spindrift draws on a rock n’ roll style characteristic of a band like the Doors; songs that make you envision heat-swamped abandoned highways, which is especially evident in a songs like Red Reflection and The Legend of God’s Gun, the title track of the spaghetti western rock n’ roll DVD promoted by the band at their merchandise booth that evening. On stage, the lead singer, who’s somewhat exhausting disconnect reminded me of the mescaline-filled adventures of Dr. Gonzo, wielded a crisp Gibson. A long-haired bassist strumming a double-neck bounced around behind him. The rest of the co-ed band featured the regular indie rock setup of guitars, keyboards, and drums. And, for this set, a guitarist for the Black Angels, stood off to the side playing the tambourine accompaniment.

On the other hand, the Black Angels in their recordings might be immediately guessed to be heirs of the Velvet Underground’s style, especially in the mellower vocals and drone. Ironically, however, they maintain a standard, physical indie rock band appearance.

But on stage, the two bands were almost interchangeable in certain characteristics such as the echoing microphone effects, hallucinogenic background projection that modeled a Jefferson Airplane Monterey Pop performance (Spindrift abandoned the latter prop for this particular show), and songs drifting from organization and structure into dreamy and cacophonous improvisation.

But of the three performances, the evening’s best was Spindrift, which lends credibility to the “second opening band is usually better than the headlining act” theory that AC had once suggested. Whereas Spindrift particularly distinguished themselves with vigorous guitarists and, perhaps unfairly, as a novelty that made the Black Angels set seem repetitive, the Black Angels set, I was disappointed to conclude about the band I had long awaited to see, was in one word: boring. Even the best tracks like the guitar-heavy Black Grease, and the critical First Vietnamese War and Snipers at the Gate began under an umbrella of a seemingly disinterested vocalist and soon unraveled into lengthy improvisation. Several hours of jam band music can be quite exhausting for an audience.