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SHOW REVIEW: Asobi Seksu, Cults, etc.

Posted by: Necci – Apr 04, 2011

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Asobi Seksu, Cults, Sun Airway, and White Laces
Thursday, March 24 at Strange Matter

If there's one huge thing that this show made clear to me, it's that the Richmond indie scene has grown quite a bit over the last couple of years. I can remember a time not too long ago when a show like this would have only filled Strange Matter (then known as the Nanci Raygun) halfway, if even that. By contrast, this show was sold out by 10 PM, before the first band had even finished playing. There were tons of young indie kids at the show that I'd never seen before. For those of my own generation, it seems like the indie scene is spiritually closest to the punk scene, and therefore it's logical to expect that most of the kids at indie shows would at least occasionally show up at punk or punk-related shows. But between the kids I was seeing for the first time at this show, the style of music most of the bands played, and the way the kids danced during the bands, what I've realized is that these days, the indie scene might be closer to the dance/electronic scene than it is to the punk scene.

White Laces, the opening act and only local band on the bill, were the closest to indie's punk roots of any of the bands that played. I've seen them play a few times, and this was probably the best performance I've seen from them yet. I'm sure the fact that they'd just returned from SXSW, where they played seven shows in four days (and caught the attention of Esquire magazine), helped out on that front, making them tighter than ever. But it also helped that their guitars weren't as ear-splittingly loud as they have been when I've seen them in the past. Singer/guitarist Landis Wine actually asked everyone before the set started whether anything sounded too loud, so it seems that he and the rest of the band have learned the value of an integrated sound, rather than always having the guitars way out in front. The lead lines Landis and other guitarist Alex French played were still clearly audible, but the White Laces sound was far more rhythmically driven overall than it has been the last couple times I've seen them. This led them away from the early 90s shoegaze style I've heard from them in the past and put them into full on early Dinosaur Jr. territory. I don't think the dance-loving indie kids in the crowd necessarily knew what to think--especially since White Laces played their set on the floor in front of the stage. I, however, thought they were excellent. I have a feeling that the indie scene as a whole will remain closely linked to dance music for the next little while, but I'm starting to see the beginning of a resurgence in loud, guitar-based indie ROCK bands recently (other local examples: Tungs, Young Adult Fiction, Lubec), and this seems to me like an entirely positive development.

Sun Airway's equipment was already set up onstage before White Laces started, so they were able to start their own set soon after White Laces finished. The crowd was way into it, with plenty of excited young kids cramming as close to the stage as possible, where they began dancing ecstatically as soon as Sun Airway started playing. While Sun Airway's music is driven by the pounding kick-drum pulse of techno music, the textures they layered on top of their dance beats were melodic and ethereal. I found myself thinking of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless LP. I grew up a fan of that record and that band, but my personal opinion is that My Bloody Valentine's peak as a group was with the EPs they did right before Loveless, Glider and Tremolo. Those records were a bit more guitar-driven than the LP ended up being, and even Loveless itself was more guitar-driven than Sun Airway's sound. Another interesting point of contrast between the two was with Sun Airway's drummer. A little-known fact about My Bloody Valentine's Loveless is that it was recorded while the band's drummer recovered from a debilitating illness, and therefore most of the beats on the album were done with a drum machine. The band used studio effects to make the machine sound more like a real person.

Meanwhile, in the live setting, Sun Airway were doing just the opposite--making their real live human drummer sound more like a machine. He had, in addition to his drum kit, a drum pad that triggered synthesized drum sounds, and he played it just as often as his real kit, if not moreso. Towards the end of the set, there was a technical problem with the drum pad, so he played one song with his regular drums instead of the pad, and the rhythm kept going just as strongly as it had with the drum pad. This made clear that the drum pad, rather than being a necessity in order to disguise a lack of conventional talent, was an aesthetic choice, made because the band liked their beats to sound synthetic. This went over well with the crowd, who loved dancing to the beats and melodies Sun Airway turned out, but I found their music best towards the end of their set, when their fifth member, who'd spent the first half of the set playing additional percussion, picked up a guitar. The guitar made the songs sound better, as did the all-too-infrequent louder moments of the set, when the drummer would forsake his drum pad to rock out for real. At times like that, the music reminded me of mid-80s UK guitar bands like Echo And The Bunnymen and The Chameleons, but Sun Airway seemed to prefer sounding like a more techno-fied My Bloody Valentine most of the time, and that didn't quite do it for me in the same way. Their set was pleasant, but on the whole not all that impressive.

Cults were next, and I wasn't sure what to expect from them. The single of theirs that I'd heard before the show was ethereal pop with minimal instrumentation, and the band's six-piece lineup seemed a bit more than was necessary in order to replicate the studio sound I'd previously heard. At least in the live setting, their sound is not nearly so minimal, and they ended up using multiple guitars and keyboards as well as a conventional rhythm section and even the occasional xylophone to create an excellent retro pop sound. Their lead vocalist was a woman with a strong voice, and when that voice combined with the sort of pre-Beatles 60's golden oldies that the band was cranking out, I found myself thinking of Mary Weiss fronting the teenaged Shangri-Las in 1964. Their tunes were as catchy as anything Shadow Morton ever came up with, and despite their decidedly throwback sound, had a modern sensibility that helped them go over well with the young audience. They played the single I'd heard, "Go Outside," towards the end of their set, and it did indeed have a light, airy arrangement that left a lot of space in the sound. However, it was somewhat of an exception to the live sound Cults generally had, and was very much overshadowed by their closing number, which got quite loud towards the end and had a tremendously catchy chorus that is still floating around in my head as I write this.

Cults' performance was excellent, thoroughly enjoyable, and won over the entire crowd. However, they had the relative misfortune of having to open for Asobi Seksu, who ended the evening with a performance that demonstrated to all present exactly why they were headlining the show. Asobi Seksu's singer played a keyboard at times during their set, as had members of Cults and Sun Airway. However, Asobi Seksu did not demonstrate the same sort of heavy dance music influence as Sun Airway and, at times, Cults had. Asobi Seksu's sound, like that of White Laces, was grounded in rock n' roll. Their songs were often loud, uptempo jams that grounded their vocal and keyboard melodies with strong rhythmic foundations.

While Asobi Seksu's diminutive Asian vocalist had a tone that resembled that of Siouxsie And The Banshees' Siouxsie Sioux at the lower end of her range, and that of the Cocteau Twins' Elisabeth Fraser at the higher end, the music was never as ethereal as the gothic/ambient sound of the bands that backed those two singers. Instead, the driving tempos, loud guitars, and the freakout noise raveups that ended many of Asobi Seksu's songs led me to think of them as far closer to the heaviest bands of the early 90s UK shoegaze scene--Ride, Swervedriver, perhaps the early Boo Radleys. Having heard their latest album, Fluorescence, before seeing the show, I was aware that soaring keyboard melodies and danceable beats are a big part of their studio sound. Live, though, they were all about psychedelic noise blastoffs. Before seeing the show, I wasn't sure just how much I liked Asobi Seksu, but those tremendous, earth-shattering wall-of-noise freakouts were enough to win me over for good.

The melodies were great, too, and kept the rest of the crowd dancing until the very end of the set, even though most of them had been dancing almost nonstop since Sun Airway started playing a few hours before. Ah, to be young again. I myself walked out of the show with sore feet and headed straight home to crawl into bed. But I went to bed happy, because I had seen a great show.

By Andrew Necci


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