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SHOW REVIEW: Young Widows
Posted by: Necci – May 25, 2011
Young Widows, My Disco, and Lights East
Thursday, May 5 at Strange Matter
Maybe it marks me out as an old man, but to me, three bands on a show seems just about perfect. I've had plentiful occasion to ponder that lately--in certain of the scenes that I keep up with, the recent fashion has been for package tours featuring four to six bands, requiring any promoter who wants to add local openers to a show to book something more like an all-day festival than a regular evening's entertainment. This kind of thing is tiring, especially since by the time the bands you really wanted to see hit the stage, you've been numbed to the excitement of live music by three hours or more of bands you've never heard of. Or, worse yet, the promoter doesn't feel like laying down the law, the opening bands play for too long, and then all the headlining bands have to cut their set times in half just so they can all play before the show has to be over. That happened at a show I paid $14 to get into recently, which was a huge disappointment. Fortunately for me, the post-hardcore scene is largely immune to this trend, so this show had the perfect amount of bands on it: three.
First was Lights East, the only local band on the bill. Everyone in Lights East except for their singer/guitarist, Jesse Clark, used to be in Alabama Thunderpussy. However, while that connection seems reasonably obvious upon looking at the band members, with their long hair and tattoos, their sound wasn't really in line with what that pedigree would lead you to expect. Instead of Southern-fried metal, my first reference point upon hearing Lights East start to play was mellow progressive post-metal. They reminded me of Porcupine Tree, or of Opeth at their most melodic. In fact, their choruses, which came complete with three-part vocal harmonies, were downright poppy. It was surprising enough to knock me a bit off-balance, and I spent the first few songs trying to figure out whether or not I liked what I was hearing. Ultimately, I had to conclude that, while it wasn't awful, it wasn't my cup of tea, either. The context in which this sort of music was being presented was enough to make me want to give it the benefit of the doubt, to see it in the progressive post-metal light which had first led me to the Opeth comparison. But after a while, I realized that Lights East, though perhaps striving for post-metal, had come up with something a good bit closer to hippie-fied prog-rock than I could really enjoy. They're relatively new on the scene, and other than this show, they have mostly been playing at places like Cary St. Cafe. No doubt they've found more receptive audiences there. They're clearly a talented band, and I'm sure they're doing a good job at the genre they've chosen to explore. Ultimately, though, I just couldn't get into what they were doing.
My Disco was much closer to what I was looking for from this show. I'd last seen this Australian three-piece nearly six years before, playing in a basement in Oregon Hill back in the summer of 2005. From seeing that show, I knew to expect good things. And from their soundcheck, I knew that I'd be foolish not to put in my earplugs. My Disco were incredibly loud--so loud that, at one point during their set, I looked to my left and saw two kids sitting near me who had curled up in the fetal position and shoved their fingers into their ears. Those kids were wise, because I'm sure anyone who braved the set without some sort of protection did serious damage to their hearing. I hadn't really kept up with My Disco's music in the years since first seeing them, so rather than the Fugazi-ish post-hardcore I expected from them, I got something quite a bit heavier, and quite a bit more single-minded. Their songs were generally based around a funky rhythm laid down by their drummer, over which the bassist would play a simple chord progression and the guitarist would rip out complex, incredibly dissonant solos. His playing was often indistinguishable from sheets of effects-laden noise, but when laid over the pulsing backbeat of the rhythm section, it was very intriguing.
In fact, I found myself drawn in by the hypnotic power of My Disco's pulsing grooves. In a way, it seemed like the band had, after nearly a decade together, worked around to a point at which their name became quite appropriate. What they were playing wasn't disco in any conventional sense, but it seemed like disco remade in their own personal image, displaying their own individual take on dance music. The centerpiece of their set was a song I later identified as "Young," from their brand new album Little Joy. This song seemed written with some of Brian Eno's most notorious composition advice in mind--I'm probably butchering this quote, but Eno once said something along the lines of: If you play something four times and it seems boring, keep playing it until it becomes interesting. With that in mind, My Disco stretched "Young" to the breaking point, playing the same minimalist midtempo riff (at mind-shearing volume) until it felt like the entire club was going to explode. I was totally caught up in what they were doing. Even as it seemed like the song should be getting totally boring--the bassist had been playing the same note for several minutes!--I found myself getting more and more into it. At the same time, it was obvious that the song didn't have this effect on everyone. While I rocked out, I could see others in the crowd shaking their heads and turning away from the stage. Apparently, the song particularly tried the nerves of one drunken young man in the crowd--halfway through it, he mounted the steps to the stage and walked over to the bassist's microphone, as if to sing. No one knew whether this was part of the show, so no one stopped him. However, when he grabbed the mic, the bassist shoved him away from it, and that broke the spell. The kid was too drunk to maintain his balance after the shove, and both he and the mic stand went toppling slowly over. By the time he hit the stage, the bouncer had arrived. He grabbed the kid, swiftly removed him from the stage, and ejected him from the show. The mic stand was returned to an upright position, and My Disco finished their set without further incident.
Young Widows finished the evening, and I must admit that their set was a slight letdown for me. Of course, considering how blown away I'd been by My Disco, the cards were stacked against Young Widows from the start. And they did still play quite well--Young Widows are a good band in general, and put on an excellent live show. However, it was hard for me to get as into it as I'd gotten into My Disco. Some of that has to do with the more recent material Young Widows have been writing. Having just released their third album, In And Out Of Youth And Lightness, their set concentrated on songs from that album, and while it is still good, I've found it to be their least satisfying album yet. It seems like with every new release, they're concentrating more and more on writing foreboding buildup parts, and less and less on satisfyingly heavy crescendos. The idea that you should always leave the people wanting more is a fundamentally sound one, and in other circumstances I've agreed with the way it's been applied. In truth, though, I liked Young Widows a bit better back when they concentrated on being heavy, rather than focusing on atmospherics.
Live, it held up more strongly than it has on recent studio albums, which was due partly to the sort of atmosphere that the band created with their unique lighting setup. They had all the stage lights turned off before they started playing, and then as soon as they struck the first note, guitarist Evan Patterson stomped on a pedal that turned on a bank of lights installed inside of the band's speaker cabinets. These lights remained on throughout the set, and provided the only light that illuminated Young Widows' performance. The mix of these strange, slightly creepy yellow lights and their foreboding buildups was a good one, and in the moment it worked. However, I have to admit that I was only pulled completely into the live performance by certain isolated moments, such as the performance of "Old Skin," from their second album, Old Wounds. The set--and their new material in general--could use a few more of these heavy, stomping moments. I know this all sounds like a negative review, and I promise that I don't intend it to be. But I saw Young Widows several years ago, when they were still mostly performing material from their first album, Settle Down City (still my favorite of their releases), and that set came a lot closer to what I wanted from a Young Widows live performance than this one did. Nobody likes to hear someone say, "I liked their early stuff better." Nonetheless, sometimes it's true.
By Andrew Necci
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