Upon entering the Performance hall at the MFA, I was instantly retrograded to my high school auditorium.
The setup, a single section of stadium seating leading downward to an unadorned platform several feet high, conjured sentiments of the impatience and restlessness in enduring the principal’s monotone speech on classroom etiquette. Yet behind the restless façade of youth was a curiosity of the collective energy of the mass assembly of peers. Although the group behavior then was not on par with the current polite hum of voices in a virtually soundproof room, some things, it seemed, never change.
After an opening band and a brief sound check, the audience was virtually silent. The acoustics in the Performance Hall were such that one could literally hear a pin drop from the opposite side of the room.
Lead singer/guitarist/musical director Dave Longstreth took the stage with the presence of a town drunk, swaggering back and forth almost violently while plucking notes at random - it was difficult to discern whether he was feeling out his tone irrespective of the hushed room of onlookers or was so inebriated he didn’t know they were present (the former quickly proved to be the case). He swayed up to the microphone and explained that they had a small technical difficulty, and it would just be a minute.
The silence had shifted from respectful eagerness to awkward anticipation.
With the commencement of the set, the valve of audience tension was quickly released.
Longstreth’s mannerisms were borderline autistic, in the sense that beneath the façade of his initially distracting eccentricities was an indisputable greatness. Gracefully accompanying his melodies were the seraphim stage left and right - guitarist Amber Coffman and bassist Angel Deradoorian. To regard their harmonic contributions as merely complementary would be a gross understatement - together the two textured the soundscape anew, pumping new blood into the exhausted heart of the abused musical description “ethereal.”
Drummer Brian Macomber’s playing combined precision and aggression in ways unimaginable - relentlessly abusing his kit in a performance that brought to mind a new spin on the phrase “tough love.” Even amidst the quartet’s most chaotic intervals a refinement pervaded, leaps and bounds beyond the “avant” approach of those who have discovered that a guitar makes noise when you run it through pedals and who have the ostentatiousness to think that doing so mindlessly is post-some-new-genre-title.
The captivated silence remained in between songs, almost unanimously asserting the presence of originality. Like the collective energy of the high-school assembly, the room stirred with an unspeakable feeling - that we were all part of something new, something so fascinating that we lost ourselves for roughly an hour and paid no heed to the mundane or the contrived. We as a group had heard the thrilling sound of optimism in the face of the turgid mainstream, and it rocked our faces.
--Bill Braun [April 13, 2008]
Photo: Anna Schindelar
