The Swedish guys from Junip have their unique way to build a giant atmospheric sound with a sort of minimalist sonic volume. Being front row in a concert teaches you how loud it can be, and with an amount of decibels way above what should be legal, many bands don’t even achieve half of what Junip did on Sunday night at the Music box, with a contained but nevertheless expending sound.
With Junip’s introverted and subtle sound, it is more about what is not played, and if there is an explosion it’s not on stage but inside yourself, inside your own brain.
If Junip is originally a trio, there were four of them playing in front of a stage that was looking like the cover of their last album ‘Fields’, with Tobias Winterkorn on organ and Moog synthesizer, Elias Araya on drums, José González on vocals and guitar, and another guy on percussion, who was later joined by a friend to do even more percussion.
The band kept a very low key figure during the whole show, doing very little talking between the songs, but you don’t go to a Junip show for this kind of things, you go for this unique sound carrying the almost inaudible influences of Africa, Brazil and Argentina, where José’s parents come from, influences so subtlety incorporated in an atmospheric and groovy sonic universe.
José is a brilliant guitarist, you can tell from the way he managed to build this sound on stage carried almost only by his guitar. The name of his band reflects this same idea of simplicity and mystery at the same time, Junip meaning nothing, but may be coming from juniper, and evoking some poetic element of nature. It’s hard to believe he and Elias were into a hardcore punk band before forming Junip, their dynamism on stage being reduced to a mere movement or a change of guitar for José.
They started the show with the determined and hopeful ‘Rope and Summit’, holding that repetitive line ‘got our rope and summit’, the melody translating a total sonic inertia, over lyrics paradoxically carrying an eagerness to move up.
The songs vary from a very melancholic sound, repeating the same loop without being monotonous, to more upbeat melodies like ‘Howls’, a free will affirmation, or ‘Always’, the closest they ever have to a hit, and a song they played during the encore.
It is all about this groove, they work on it for a long time, the song never wandering very far from it, too occupied to work on this ambient and wide landscape.
‘Black refuge’, ‘an old one’, as José said during one of his rare moments of talking, had this layered organic sound building a dramatic and powerful effect, ‘Sweet and bitter’ had this thumping keyboard that let slowly perceive its African roots, and ‘Without you’ began with that fragile melody with sparse percussion and agitated mellow guitar, digging that same path many times until the tension was released by this twisters of lights and swirls of organ.
The songs can be built around delicate melodies but fueled by a vigorous guitar and exotic percussion like ‘Chickens’, or built around windy atmospheres like ‘At the doors’, where the rare lyrics were lost in a hypnotic mantra-like sound, just like its accelerated and almost menacing companion, ‘Far away’. That was the moment where they seemed the closest to play rock music.
Their set seemed so short, and I had the impression each of their songs could have lasted for long jams, as José Gonzales looked visibly very comfortable playing with his friends after touring solo for a long time
Coming back for an encore after only a few seconds away, they did a Junipized and effortless version of ‘The ghost of Tom Joad’ without the big sound explosion of Springsteen, but a real melancholic emotion, continuing with the long awaited for ‘Always’, the grooviest of all, and finishing with the loopy ‘In every direction’ which was accumulating layers and layers of notes, ascending toward a summit, they had never had the intention to reach.
Setlist
Rope and Summit
To the Grain
Howl
Black refuge
Sweet and bitter
Without you http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKJi4XfHqng
It’s alright
Chickens
At the doors
Encore
The ghost of Tom Joad
In every direction