All along Active Child’s set at the Echo, I was watching the girl on my left side, who had suddenly arrived front row to watch the show, passing in front of the shouting-drunken guys behind me, who unfortunately could not shut up for a second. Apparently alone, she watched the show, with a shy smile on her face, so attentive and concentrated that the room could have be burning down, she would not have turned her back to the stage.
This is to say that Los Angeles-based Patrick James Grossi, aka Active Child, is not your usual singer-songwriter: he sang with this falsetto-angelic voice and played harp, yes harp, during about half of his hymn-like songs, and the club was packed with an enthusiastic crowd during the performance, making Grossi say, with a large smile, that he was not expecting this.
Surrounded by two synthesizers, one played by a musician also operating on bass, Grossi was switching from the harp to one of the synths, while launching his operatic vocals (he was trained as a choir boy in his youth) over textured melodies beaten down by hard dark drumbeats, slowly building a dichotomous church-like and dramatic sound inside the club, haunted by electronics and spacey notes. But the weirdness did not stop there, he was also using his incredible voice for some synthpop songs transforming themselves into some pure throbbing dance-numbers, and making the drunken guys quiet for a moment, too busy dancing. Honestly I was preferring the harp-driven songs, they just sounded more original with the constant contrast between the synthetic sounds and the fragile one of the harp, which sounded almost like a kora.
But curiously these two different styles were combining with grace and ease, producing this genre that Active Child calls hymntronic on their website, switching from this Justin-Vernon-sad-choir vocals on songs like ‘Wilderness’ and ‘Body Heat (So Far Away)’, to some Jimmy-Sommerville grandeur; there must be a more recent singer who does that same kind of falsetto, but I am old, and every time I hear these kinds of synth, I think about the 80s, … and New Order, that Active Child covers by the way!
The music was glorious, a little sad but sonically huge especially because of Grossi’s exceptional voice going with ease from this falsetto to a tenor level. As the band is about to release a debut album ‘You Are All I See’ via Vagrant on August 23rd, it has currently a free Monday residency at the Echo.
And the attentive girl? Of course she vanished as soon as Pat Grossi left the stage