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2004-08-08 - 11:57 p.m.
Am I Soundboy
After work on Sunday night, I headed down to the Ottobar to catch the hometown stop on Cex’s current tour. I caught the last couple songs of the first band, the Economist, and they were alright, generic mathy stuff, but their drummer was amazingly graceful, I enjoyed just watching him do his thing. There was an ungodly long break between the first and second bands, as apparently Make Believe got to the venue late for some unexplained reason. I’m sure it was something beyond their control so I shouldn’t hold it against them, but the hourlong wait was pretty greuling. Make Believe is a band comprised of pretty much the same lineup of Joan Of Arc that I saw a couple times last year. I have a couple JOA records and enjoy them a little, but live they were better than I expected them to be. Make Believe is a different band, though, with different material. Since they started so late, they were only able to play for 20 minutes, but all their songs were pretty short so they fit a lot in. The most impressive aspect of their set was that during most songs the drummer played keyboard with one hand and drummed with the other, so capably that if you weren’t watching him it wouldn’t have occurred to you that both instruments were being played by the same person. Other than that, i didn’t think much of them. Cex started his set shortly after. Last time I saw him on a brief tour last fall, he had been playing with a live drummer for the first time, and operating a large, complicated looking soundboard that he’d mix different sounds in and out with. They played long, proggy songs with long instrumental passages, and in all it was just a bit windy and unpleasant. But I really liked the opening band at that show, Nice Nice, and Cex ended up collaborating with them for the new album that’s coming out this year. This show had a similiar setup, except he had a different drummer, Cale Parks from Joan Of Arc, and the material sounded much more refined. Also, as the set progressed, more and more people joined them onstage. First, a girl whose name I didn’t catch, who sang along with Rjyan on many of the songs, and played some percussion. Then, 3 members of Make Believe came onstage and played guitar and extra percussion. So at some points there were as many as 4 people onstage playing some kind of percussion, shakers or cymbals or snare drums. It was a very dense, polyrhythmic sound, and it kind of reminded me of Peter Gabriel’s dark worldbeat type stuff, which I know Rjyan is a big fan off. The songs seemed pretty loosely structured, with short passages with lyrics and long jammy bits. He mixed in various synths and sounds, but overall it was driven by rhythm and not melody. It didn’t sound much like the stuff he played last fall, or like the demos with Nice Nice that he posted on the website a couple months ago. So I’m curious how representative the set was of what the new album will sound like. A couple songs went on for a long time, maybe 10 minutes or more. When Rjyan said they were done at first, people in the audience asked him to play some more, and he said he’d play “a short one”, which ended up being well over 5 minutes, although still relatively short compared to the other songs. Most of the songs never really came to any real climax, in the sense that live improv usually does, but they did have some peaks and valleys and interesting changes of direction. Around the time Cex’s set was about to start, I ran into Tom, who I’ve met a couple times before at shows, and who I’ve recently been in contact with online via our respective blogs, which link each other. He’s a nice guy, writes a lot for the Baltimore City Paper and some other places, and I saw him at Cex and Dismemberment Plan and Grand Buffet shows for a long time before knowing who he was. I think he came a way from the show with a higher opinion of it than I did. He’s been about as many Cex shows as I have (9 or 10, many of which being the same shows), and said this was the best he’d ever seen. I’d put it somewhere in the middle. Tom and I ended up shooting the shit for like 20 minutes after the show was over, definitely longer than I’ve ever talked to him in person before. Hopefully I’ll run into him at more shows in the future. -al
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