The xx and Austra at The Tabernacle, February 2, 2013

So the big surprise of The xx concert last night was not only that there was an opening act (none were listed on the tickets, the Tabernacle web site, or any listing that I could find), but also who they were. I went expecting to see a show by a single band, and kind of assumed that The xx were the kind of band that could pull that off.

It was a cold and rainy night when I arrived at the sold-out show at The Tabernacle, and 15 minutes before the doors opened the line already stretched down Baker Street and around the corner down Spring Street.  By the time I got in (8:15 or so), the floor was already pretty crowded so I found a not-bad seat up in the first balcony to watch the show.  Observing the stage, I could tell that someone else was going to play first. A drum set was one clue (The xx use all electronic percussion) and The xx's equipment was still covered with tarps behind the mystery band's set up.  No one in the audience around me knew who was opening and most, like me, were anticipating a one-band performance.

At a few minutes after 9:00, the house lights dimmed and the band took the stage to great applause.  I didn't recognize them until the drummer took a seat behind her kit - it was the unmistakable Maya Postepski, one of the hippest looking ladies in rock music today.  We last saw Ms. Postepski last September during MFNW, when she transformed Portland's Holocene nightclub into an 80's new wave dance club with her band Trust, but I quickly realized that this wasn't Trust on stage but her other band, the terrific Austra.

If not for Ms. Postepski, I probably wouldn't have recognized Austra's singer and principal performer Katie Stelmanis until the music started.  Last time we saw Austra was during Rocktober 2011, when she was a part of a brilliant strings of sets at The Earl that included her, Zola Jesus, St. Vincent, and Grimes, a veritable tour de force of indie female rockers, she looked quite different, wearing a red velvet gown and her blonde hair framing her face with bangs.  Last night, she took the stage looking far more casual, wearing a black sweater tucked into jeans and her hair tied up in a long ponytail.  There would have been no mistaking her voice, though - Ms. Stelmanis is a powerhouse singer and a former operatic student, and can pierce the atmosphere with precise, enunciated tones and notes without seeming to even try, a perfect compliment to the driving, electronic music of her band.

Back at The Earl, the band included two terrific back-up singers, twin sisters Sari and Romy Lightman who also perform as the band Tasseomancy.  Last night, the sisters were not with the band, which performed as a keyboards-drums-bass-vox quartet.  I thought their contribution would be missed, especially on the stand-out song The Beat and The Pulse, but Ms. Stelmanis ably compensated, agilely switching from the backing Ooo-Ooo-Ooo's to the main vocals, and Ms. Postepski singing some backup vocals as well. 

I certainly wouldn't have recognized bass player Dorian Wolf, who performed at The Earl wearing a scary looking mask (it was the night before Halloween).

Austra at The Earl, including Tasseomancy and scary bassist (10/30/11)

Austra (Katie Stelmanis and Dorian Wolf) at The Tabernacle (2/2/13)

During their set, Austra played several songs that sounded new to me.  We're overdue to a follow-up to 2011's terrific Feel It Break., and this tour with The xx may be a part of the band breaking in some new material.

Fun facts:  I learned during her stage banter last night that Toronto's Austra is pronounced the Canadian way ("Oh-stra"), while I had been mispronouncing it the American way ("Aw-stra").  Also, for some reason, Katie Stelmanis wore a big, Flavor Flav-style heart necklace.

The xx opened their set that way they open their second album Coexist, with Angels and Romy Madley-Croft's hushed and vulnerable lyrics (". . .As in love with you as I am.").  It was an emotional and fitting start for their hour-long set of songs about tortured love, vulnerability, and alienation, played against their own instantly recognizable blend of sparse, minimalistic rock, R&B, and hip hop.

It's been almost three years since The xx last played Atlanta.  Back in November 2009, they played the tiny Drunken Unicorn in what must have been a memorable night (I wasn't there), and then returned to headline at Variety Playhouse on March 24, 2010 (I did make that one), with Nosaj Thing and jj opening, but until last night's performance at The Tabernacle, I don't know of them playing this town since.  During the intervening years, the band toured globally, won numerous awards, and recorded their second album, the aforementioned Coexist.  Last night, bassist Oliver Sims apologized for the long absence from Atlanta and promised to not stay away for so long again.  

To the few who may for whatever reason still be unfamiliar wit the band at this point, one of there many unique features is the trading vocal duties between Mr. Sims and Ms. Madley-Croft, usually during a single song.  The back-and-forth vocals between male and female singers creates the impression of a dialog, an intimate conversation between a couple, allowing opportunities to explore themes of intimacy, alienation, and vulnerability.

Multi-instrumentalist Jamie Smith, who also produces under the name Jamie XX, provides the beats, using electronics, pads, drums, and other percussion, and generally fills in all the sounds that aren't the vocals, Sims' bass, or Madley-Croft's guitar.  

The band played a mix of songs from Coexist and their previous, eponymous album.  Toward the middle of the set, The xx played a medley of several songs together, with Jamie providing electronic segues between tunes.

It wasn't until the end of the last song of their set that the band displayed their iconic X on the screen behind them to thunderous applause and the lights from scores of iPhones.  The band left the stage with their logo still displayed, and during their encore set, various color effects were added to the display, similar to the cover design on their new album.

It was a great set by The xx, polished and highly professional, combining both old and new songs and full of emotionally resonant passages.  That, combined with the pleasant surprise of Austra's opening set, made for a very special evening.

Caveman

We last saw the Brooklyn band Caveman opening for Here We Go Magic back in May 2011, when they were touring behind their great album, 2011's Coco, Beware.  

Caveman has a new, self-titled album coming out April 2, and they will be coming to Atlanta's Drunken Unicorn on Saturday, April 6 in support of that effort.  Here's In The City, the first release from the new album.  

No opening acts have been announced for the Drunken Unicorn yet, but the April 6 show is the start of a run of great, post-March Madness dates at the D.U., including:

Monday, April 15th: Wavves, Fidlar
Tuesday, April 23rd: Acid Mothers Temple
Monday, April 29th: Akron/Family
Saturday, May 4th: Telekinesis

The Return of Father John Misty

Tickets go on sale today for Father John Misty's return to Atlanta on Saturday, May 11, to play the godforsaken Masquerade, along with the opening duo of Adam Green and Binki Shapiro.



I've already got mine - what happens next is up to you.

Chelsea Wolfe, The Earl, Atlanta - January 30, 2013

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.