The weekend is over and I have heard more live music than some people will in their lifetime! I hardly exaggerate, my head is stuffed with so much music, that my brain has made a bizarre soup of everything I have heard. Really, this all-you-can-eat festival is a crazy and dangerous thing for music addicts like me, it could even make you sick after a while. Now the difficult task to make sense of what I have heard and see begins, but I actually did much better on Sunday than on Saturday, because I saw many more bands!
The first band I saw on Saturday at the Echoplex, was a very familiar one I have seen several times before, but it’s always a good way to start. Manhattan Murder Mystery has become an Echo Park myth/legend and every time I see them they are more numerous on stage: Mathew Teardrop was surrounded by seven musicians this time, with violin and piano,… what a grand ensemble! And a clear trend for this year’s bands I have noticed. They must have written a lot of new songs because I hardly recognized anything I knew, but the band was loyal to its legend: the bass player was turning her back to the crowd, Teardrop kept his backpack and bandana the whole time, he rose his arm to give the start to each of their sonic assaults, and screamed his despair like a heartbroken frenetic, while making jokes and sipping beer between the songs. It was way too early for him but he made one of his famous stage exits by jumping from the stage, dropping his guitar on someone’s lap and running away from the scene like a thief.
On the outdoor stage, I had the occasion to check out Olin and the Moon and Gap Dream during the afternoon. I don’t know who was Olin, but the singer looked a little bit like a young Beck or Thom Yorke, he was wearing a Whitesnake t-shirt and had a nasal country voice, whereas another guitarist had a more metal look. With a four guitar-bass ensemble, they were playing a foot-tapping alt-country going arena rock at times, between Ryan and Bryan Adams, with hooky harmonies and ascending chords, which was always staying on the gentle side… It was pleasant music without any surprises, but was it really alt country? I thought they were putting back the B in Ryan a bit too much.
A little bit later, the long haired guys of Gap Dream brought a sort of muddy-sludgy psychedelia, but the style of the songs they played were too eclectic to fit in a single formula. The ambiance was druggy, trippy, smoky with slow head banging straight from the 70s, sometimes upbeat and grungy (the guitarist looked a bit like Cobain). But I have just used way too many ys, but they seemed to do their own things with ease, faces in the sun and hair in the wind.
Inside the Taix Champagne room, it’s quite possible that Young Impress did impress lots of people, as the room was filled with a large dancing crowd. The band (five guys and a girl) was playing a dynamic power pop music with male-female harmonies, pounding bouncing keys, and delivered with urgency and a youthful energy. The two front man-woman looked familiar and for a good reason: I had seen them before when they fronted a 11-piece group named Paulie Pesh. Their over-the-top enthusiasm reminded me a bit Youngblood Hawk’s, a band which played Echo Park Rising last year and which is doing very well these days, didn’t they have a song in a Coca Cola commercial? I don’t know if the same thing will be happening to Young Impress, may be a lot of their songs had a little bit that same speedy bouncy tempo, but Paulie Pesh was drenched in sweat just after a few songs, and they weren’t holding anything back.
Inside the Echo, Detective was an intriguing band for the only reason it was named after a Jean Luc Godard movie. The trio (which was formed by ex-Guided by Voices James Greer) had a punkish flavor, a fast energy and sensual melodies sung by Greer and ex-Tennis System Guylaine Vivarat. With his intellectual look and badass delivery, Greer was joking between the songs, but the guy has just a too intimidating resume for me to continue… editor at Spin and engaged to Kim Deal in the 90s, novel writer and screenwriter, and of course musician, he looked and especially sounded a bit like a blonde Lou Reed, agreeably complemented by Vivarat’s sexy presence.
Downstairs, in the dark Echoplex, I caught Cillie Barnes and her graceful presence. With her elegant long white dress and blue velvet collar, she looked like an enchanting Disney princess dancing along her wide-eyed poppy hoppy tunes. She had a fragile broken voice, the kind that keeps you interested, and I thought she was ready to fly when she was moving her dress. There was something a little magic and surreal about her performance, she was a little bubbly Stevie Nicks, ready to open her mysterious world.
Next, the sextet Kan Wakan was both intriguing and fascinating. With textural soundscapes, they first gave me the vibe of a minimalist synth Radiohead fronted by a Sade-meets-Nathalie Merchant singer, but I am not sure it was the right vibe anymore. Still, their subtle compositions were bringing mystery with a sort of noir ambiance, some velvety-sensual vocals and a layered instrumentation, strangely clear despite the number of different musicians on stage (six beside singer Kristianne Bautisda). There were a violin (as a lot of bands I saw this year), some desolated keys, a sad sax whose melancholy was torn down by a tearful synth. Their last song was probably stretched too long, but they have an upcoming album and should be an interesting band to follow.
Back around the Taix outdoor stage, I caught the end of the Soft Pack’s set, and Matt Lamkin was singing with his usual throwaway attitude, hands in pockets and morose tone. They delivered their songs with the same badass-fucked-you manner, but, honestly, I have seen Soft Pack’s shows where people were moving, stage diving, crowd surfing and not much was happening there… it was probably the heat, or the exhaustion of seeing so many bands.
The noisy cacophonic fanfare Killsonic erupted just before White Arrows’ set, and they distracted me from the band’s strange music made of ethereal multi-voices mixed with psychedelic synth,… their sound was muddy and drowned in reverb, quite busy as the voices were echoing each other, resonating as if we were in a church (strangely, the name of the singer). But then they had a dance floor number with pounding drums, and a more poppy song with bouncy exotic guitars, so I am not sure I can still describe what I have heard, right now it’s all fuzzy in my mind like a collision of weird particles at high speed. Singer Mickey Church suddenly put an electric blue wig on, mentioned a song about being a whore, and they played a harsh dance number going back into softer weirdness and Africanized pop. I still don’t know what I have heard, although their last song sounded familiar?
The last band I saw was Big Black Delta, and I thought that an electronic bulldozer had invaded the stage. Jonathan Bates was making big noisy splashes all over the place with smoggy and earthshaking synths, horn and sax (that weren’t conventionally used) and two drum sets. His shirt large-open revealing his chest, his set was a bit over the top, grandiose with long croons and arms to the sky to give momentum to these violent soundscapes of dark disco stomp and roaring drums and guitar… a bit weird but this gave the impression there was a crazy battle going on over there although the stage was too dark to see clearly. I left before the end of the performance (the people with me were so tired!) and if I totally got the big and probably the black, but I am still scratching my head over the delta.
