Netherfriends, White Laces, and Tungs
Sunday May 1 at Strange Matter
Those who have been following this website for a while may have noticed that we’ve given significant coverage to Chicago’s Netherfriends over the past year or so. They’ve played Richmond pretty frequently during that time–about once every four months or so–but I myself had never seen them before this show. I was looking forward to catching their quirky pop music in a live environment, and had reason to believe that their live performance would be a unique experience. This seemed especially true once I found out that the group’s leader and only constant member, Shawn Rosenblatt, had gone a step beyond the rotating lineups of his band’s previous year of touring in order to do his current tour all by himself. I looked forward to seeing how he would recreate the compositions he’d originally intended to be performed by a full band.
Netherfriends, White Laces, and Tungs
Sunday May 1 at Strange Matter
Those who have been following this website for a while may have noticed that we’ve given significant coverage to Chicago’s Netherfriends over the past year or so. They’ve played Richmond pretty frequently during that time–about once every four months or so–but I myself had never seen them before this show. I was looking forward to catching their quirky pop music in a live environment, and had reason to believe that their live performance would be a unique experience. This seemed especially true once I found out that the group’s leader and only constant member, Shawn Rosenblatt, had gone a step beyond the rotating lineups of his band’s previous year of touring in order to do his current tour all by himself. I looked forward to seeing how he would recreate the compositions he’d originally intended to be performed by a full band.
Tungs opened up the show, projecting indistinct images of old cartoons onto the stage while they played. The black stage equipment and the movements of the band members kept the cartoon images from cohering into something easily discernible, so I have no idea if they were Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, or what. Tungs rocked out in a far more distinct fashion, continuing with their recent trend of loud, fast material. The psychedelia that informed their earlier work shows up most often in their newer work in the form of noise-saturated solos, while their riffing and song construction just gets more and more straightforward and to the point. Right now it seems like their heading for a sound that’s more noise-punk than psychedelia, and that would be fine with me. The only sour note of their performance came two songs in, when guitarist/bassist Ben Miller suffered some sort of equipment failure that caused the entire song to grind to a halt. He put down the guitar he was playing and finished the set playing bass, so I’m guessing that something was wrong with the guitar. Members of Tungs were later heard to comment that their good guitars were all in the shop. Perhaps playing loud, noisy music has a hidden cost.
White Laces were next, and set up on the floor rather than the stage, as has become their modus operandi at recent shows I’ve seen by them. It often seems to me that the clarity of White Laces live performances is in inverse proportion to their volume. The wall of sound they can create at their loudest fever pitch is surely powerful, but sometimes it’s better to turn down a little bit in pursuit of a more accessible sound. As a band, they are clearly seeking a happy medium, and they’re close to finding it, though I think at this show the balance may have been tilted a little too much in favor of loudness. Regardless, with the aid of earplugs, I could make out everything pretty well, so it was a successful set on the whole. At one point in the middle, the band tried a new song that they clearly hadn’t quite practiced enough to get down pat–things spun out of control somewhere in the middle of the song, with everyone eventually trailing off to stare at each other quizzically. They returned to more familiar material after this, shredding the place with versions of songs like “Motorik Twilight” and epic set-closer “Sick Of Summer,” from their self-titled five song 12 inch. They actually had physical copies of this album for sale, after months of it being an internet-only release, which was great to see. I grabbed one, and you should too; it is, for my money, one of the better releases to come out of Richmond this year.
Netherfriends closed out the show with a hotly anticipated set that had a crowd gathered at the front of the stage for several minutes before he started playing. Shawn Rosenblatt had spent White Laces’s set building himself an elaborate musical contraption onstage, with keyboards and microphones plugged into elaborate sequences of effects pedals, and percussion instruments bolted together into an ad-hoc drumkit that hung from one side of the keyboard stand. Over the course of his set, each of the songs built up slowly, as Shawn used effects pedals to create multi-layered background loops that would form the song’s rhythmic and melodic baseline. Once he had these running, he could start playing the actual song, contributing lead lines on guitar or keyboard, or sometimes just dancing around and singing as an entire band’s worth of background loops played the song without him. An artist with more complex songs might have trouble replicating full-band material in this fashion, but the simple, catchy pop of the Netherfriends lent itself well to the format, and I recognized slightly altered arrangements of several different songs that I’d previously heard by the group. The way the songs tended to kind of play themselves once they got going allowed for quite a bit more freedom in the live show than one might expect from a solo performance.
Shawn had a lot of fun dancing around onstage while singing his songs, climbing onto his rickety percussion ensemble at a couple of points, and eventually ending the set in the midst of the crowd, who were all just as into it as he was. He turned his excellent song “Bret Easton Ellis Novel” into a chant of the chorus from “Fight For Your Right” by the Beastie Boys, which had the whole crowd singing along with him. This triumphant moment was clearly intended to be the set’s conclusion, but ultimately the crowd wouldn’t let him stop playing, so he did one of the newer songs he’d written as part of his recent 50 Songs In 50 States project (which, by the way, was completed with a show in Hawaii just before the solo tour began). This song was less familiar, but went over just as well with the appreciative crowd.
Netherfriends are a strange, uncommercial project fueled by the creative efforts of an eccentric songwriter with no fixed address. However, in spite of that reality, they’ve built up quite a following in Richmond over the past year, and after witnessing their live performance, it’s no surprise. Shawn Rosenblatt’s willingness to put everything on the line in order to pursue his uncompromised creative vision is admirable, and what’s more, seems to be yielding some pretty incredible results. His next venture is a tour of the Northeast by bicycle, after which he hopes to come through Richmond again sometime this summer. Keep an eye out for that; if this show at Strange Matter was any indication, you don’t want to miss it.
