Amidst my many days in the Boston area music scene, I have often encountered the ambivalence of musicians toward the local crowd response. This of course is genre-specific, but growing up living, eating, and breathing the Massachusetts hardcore scene, it was ingrained in many of us that the way to pay homage to the music was by moshing our collective asses off - the physical exertion was consummate with the intensity of the show. Much of heavy music still lives by this creed, but I have since lost interest due to the stale formulaic approach of most of the hardcore and metal bands prominent today.
Dwelling in adolescence such as this prompts one to question certain occurrences cited by musicians and spectators alike; in this instance, times when the crowd doesn’t move during clear-cut cases of artists rocking socks off. Explanations include, but are by no means limited to: “this crowd just doesn’t know good music…,” “Bostonians are all pretentious…,” “no one cares about the music anymore, they just care about being part of a scene…,” and on and on. Seeing Irepress last night affirmed that statements along these lines are by no means universal in the Boston area. Aside from heads nodding and intermittent full-body rockers, the crowd at Great Scott wasn’t moving very much. Why was this so? (drum roll)… They were listening.
From the moment Irepress took stage to their unexpectedly abrupt set ending, the audience was captivated. Granted, the quintet draw from an arena of technicality to which the average listener would tear a muscle trying to headbang along - yet this did not dissuade anyone from resuming bobbing his/her head when the band transitioned from foreign time signatures into grooves smooth enough to feel innate. Irepress have made an art of composing songs in which extreme dynamic changes coalesce with a natural fluidity. From “the brutal to the beautiful” (a previous description of the band’s music), no sonic stone was left unturned as the mesmerized audience hung on each note. This was in large part due to the live mix (compliments of Salim Akram from the Eclectic Collective), but then again, their seamless 35-minute “power set” would have turned heads though a broken stereo.
Upon opening with the title track off of the recently re-released Samus Octology, conversations ceased, cigarettes were snuffed out front, and all eyes and ears gravitated toward the stage. The only two breaks in the set lent opportunities for bassist Shan Davé to give a humble word of thanks and mention the merch booth. The second break of the two allowed a moment for Shan to remark nonchalantly: “this is the second time we have played this next song.” Following these words was the most epic (and technically demanding) song of the set, performed without the slightest audible blemish. One was stricken with a feeling beyond the satisfaction of just seeing a band playing songs - it was an experience in the most literal sense; something which, save the performance artist community and select musical contemporaries, is all but absent from most live shows today. In fact, many of the bands to which Irepress have been (unfairly) compared - bands part of the “instrumental” genre - attempt to recreate this very notion of crafting an experience, but more often than not wind up further dramatizing the already distilled genre-specific ideas to the point of boredom. In contrast to merely reciting tunes from the catalog, the set as a whole plunged the listener into uncharted areas with unceasing intensity. The result - an audience so engulfed in the music that most attempts to move looked more like sporadic muscle spasms than rocking out.
As I gathered my thoughts after their set, I overheard a close friend echo words of previous Irepress shows: “good luck following that.” And I don’t think I saw him move once.
--Bill Braun
Photo: Scott Kinkade
