Chelsea Wolfe played The Earl last night, with Women's Work and Featureless Ghost opening. There's a lot that needs to be said about this. But first I want to note that last night was my first time at The Earl since last November 3 when we saw Lost In The Trees. It's been nearly three months since I've been back, surely a record, due in part to the Wilnter Doldrums and in part to the bookings at so many other clubs.
Writing in The New Yorker (Music To Your Ears, January 28, 2013), Adam Gopnik explains that there seems to be two "systems" in the brain that respond to music. One is veridical and responds to the pleasant sounds of the songs we already know. The other is sequential and anticipates the next note or harmonic move in an unfamiliar phrase of music. The sequential system is stimulated when music follows the logic of the notes or surprises us in some way that isn't merely arbitrary.
If you want to know if your mind is primarily veridical or sequential, consider this: which would you choose if given the choice to be able to hear all of your favorite music whenever you wanted but to never be able to hear any new music at all, or to be able to hear nothing but new music all the time but never hear again anything that you've heard before. If you choose the first option, your mind is primarily veridical and if the second option sounds better, your mind is primarily sequential.
Personally, my mind is predominantly, even aggressively, sequential. It's not that I don't enjoy re-hearing music that I've learned to love (I do), but I'm much more interested and intrigued by the next thing, by what's new, by what I haven't yet heard. As it turns out, this is a great time for sequential minds. In the past, if you wanted to hear new music you would have to go out to a music store and buy a not-inexpensive new CD or LP, which caused one to make conservative choices and purchase "tried and true" music with which one was familiar. Today it's fairly easy and cheap to load an iPod with more gigs of music than you can possibly listen to, while also using streaming services like Spotify or Pandora to generate endless playlists of a nearly infinite variety of new music. Meanwhile, music blogs, YouTube, and other internet services open up more opportunities to hear even more new music. The real problem, to be honest, is keeping up with it all, and my biggest regret is realizing that how much I'm still missing out on despite prodigious efforts to keep up with it all.
The sweet spot between a purely sequential experience and a strict viridial one is when you have the chance to listen to a new, unrecorded band that you've heard once or twice before and know what to expect, but who's particular songs you still don't know so that everything still sounds fresh. Such was the case with the opening band last night, Atlanta's Women's Work.
We've heard Women's Work twice before - last year in Oakland Cemetery at the annual Tunes From The Crypt event, and then again at Criminal Records during the Little Five Fest. I like this band - they have a dark, somber sound but aren't afraid to play loud when volume's needed, but I don't know much about them, so every song's still a bit of a surprise, even when they performed a Hank Williams cover. They have their first record coming out soon, which may give them some deserved recognition and exposure.
I'm more familiar with the next band that took the stage, Atlanta's Featureless Ghost. Featureless Ghost is the duo of Matt Weiner and Elise Tippins, who've been performing and recording music together since 2007 and relocated from Brooklyn to Atlanta and formed the band in late 2010.
We've seen Featureless Ghost a number of times now, opening for bands at both The Earl and 529. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I know all of their songs, so it wasn't a completely veridical experience, but I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from their synth-flavored electro-dance rock.
I like these guys, a lot, but last night's stage was not the place for them. Their highly danceable, dark wave sound sounded a little out of place between the southern gothic melodies of Women's Work and the acoustic folk-trance that Chelsea Wolfe brought to the stage after them. This is in no way a criticism of the band, but perhaps of the booking. The first band, Women's Work, had heads nodding approvingly, and Featureless Ghost got people up and dancing. But it's a disorienting if not a little cruel to get folk's feet moving only to have them stop and the body return to head bobbing for the headlining act.
So this leaves us with the main event, LA-by-way-of-Sacramento's Chelsea Wolfe. We last saw Ms. Wolfe on this same stage at The Earl back in August when she was touring behind her Apokalypsis album and fronting an electric band, playing electric guitar herself. Now, she is touring behind a new album, Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs, and is backed by a smaller, almost minimalist band.
Ms. Wolfe performed exclusively on acoustic guitar last night and was backed by a violinist and keyboards, which merely provided some coloration to the songs rather than fill out the sound. It was a quiet sound, quite different from her previous visit to The Earl, and the usual noise and chatter from the bar at the back of The Earl were distracting at times. Still, Ms. Wolfe played a great set full of some very interesting harmonic effects and melodies that more than compensated for the attention the music required, even is she did have to "shush" the crowd a couple of times. This was basically coffee house music being performed in a bar.
As always, Chelsea Wolfe looked lovely, and the stage was lit with candles giving it a suitably gothic look. I had managed to get up to the front row and can confidently report they smelled great as well. A pair of talismanic animal horns sat on a table next to Ms. Wolfe as she performed.
Here's a pretty representative video of what the band sounded like last night.
The hour-long set set ended dramatically with a lovely and complex number dominated by over-layered vocals, the same song, I believe, that she ended her Apokalypsis set with last year. After she left, the audience stayed by the stage but only called her back for an encore with the most half-hearted of applause and cheers. But ever the professional, Ms. Wolfe came back on stage alone and displayed a warmer side of her personality than the lean, tortured songs before permitted, even asking the audience if anyone had a guitar pick and requesting a song to perform.
No comments:
Post a Comment