Fara is at home in New York City this summer, and going to lots of concerts that she will describe in detail for everyone who wasn’t there. She will switch to the first person to avoid potential confusion and accusations of a big ego. On Sunday night I saw Small Black’s homecoming show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, with Cool Serbia and Heavenly Beat opening. Williamsburg is a long trek from my house, and if you’ve never been, it’s quite different from the rest of the city. The buildings are short (by my standards, anything under eight floors is a hovel) and the narrow streets are lined with little eateries that glow with neon. The neighborhood is comfortingly grimy—the same way I remember the city when I was a child, before Bloomberg and the specter of gentrification. The Music Hall of Williamsburg is laid out in a fashion that’s familiar to me, but would seem ridiculous to anyone who hadn’t spent their life listening to music within the cramped confines of the urban jungle. You enter down a long, blue-lit hallway with a door that opens onto the main floor and a steep, winding staircase that leads up three floors to the gallery above the stage. This layout is the inevitable product of trying to cram a music hall into a small apartment building while trying to preserve any good acoustics whatsoever. There are two narrow wings of the gallery that go up all the way to the stage on either side, and are lined with small round tables. If you had been there that night, you would have found me at the table second-closest to the wall, on the right side of the stage if you were facing it. I would have been sipping a flat soda and surreptitiously taking notes on a scrap of paper, as I do at almost every concert. Let me say a few words that will conjure the proper atmosphere: there was a LOT of white-people dancing. Throughout the concert, the floor was filled with what looked like a mass epileptic seizure; I was embarrassed for the people whose arms continued to flail wildly after the song had ended, and whose gyrating hips occasionally spilled other peoples’ beer. But Cool Serbia, who kicked off the evening (more like toed gently), inspired only indifference. Apparently they hail from Houston; I wish they’d go back there. A self-labeled “doom-wop” group (cringe), I found nothing compelling in their brand of wimpy 4/4 wannabe-shoegaze. Their songs relied heavily on basic barre chords, which the two guitarists struggled to even play. Raz, the singer, was possessed of a squeaky nasal voice and a pair of alarmingly tight pants. He bobbed and shimmied his way through six mercifully brief songs. Their drummer was all right, but the moment their set ended he slumped apologetically offstage. The trio had copped all the rockstar moves without actually being possessed of any talent or songwriting gift. They were amateur; at one point, their singer actually asked the audience “we’re good? You like us?” as if in disbelief. Cue the inexplicable thirty minutes it takes to transition between bands. I have never understood this. If the first band shuffles off within ten minutes after their set, trailing cables and tripping over their untied shoelaces, and the second band finishes fiddling with all their cords and re-tuning their guitars for the umpteenth time in another ten minutes, why must we endure a full ten more minutes of buzz-killing ‘mood’ music while watching an empty stage? By this point, I was aware the evening was off to a rough start. But no one ever expects the opening band to be good (unless they’re only slightly less famous than the main act, in which case I’ve actually come to see the openers and could care less about The Black Keys), and so I was stupidly optimistic that things would get better. Had I allowed my natural cynicism free rein, I would perhaps have been prepared for what came next. Heavenly Beat, I am disappointed in you. It wasn’t like I walked into this never having heard your music—I listened to a few of your records on Spotify, and even briefly considered playing a something of yours on my radio show before I wisely replaced you with Japanther or Swearin’. “Faithless”, with its vaguely Spanish guitar sting and funky baseline, isn’t even a bad song. And your Brooklyn label, Captured Tracks, is one I hold in high regard. I like most of the artists signed to it; why did you have to make me hate you with such venom? Well, there are many reasons, a few of which I’ll enumerate here. First of all, your bio doesn’t mention Heavenly Beat frontman/sinister mastermind John Peña’s complete inability to sing in tune. While pawing at his laptop (from which the prerecorded ‘beats’ that made up 90% of the music emanated) and staggering under the weight of a guitar he barely touched during the set, said Beach Fossils bassist cooed such flaccid platitudes as “you decide to fall on me/matching our strides/time will tell if it means something” with all the dewy-eyed romance of a serial killer. I was immediately creeped out by the way he lurched forward to deliver his Hallmark-card-meets-deranged stalker lyrics, gripping the microphone tightly with arms extended and then yanking it in like some poor girl who’d agreed to a second date despite her initial misgivings. He also punctuated the end of every other line by huffing or hissing loudly into the mic multiple times, a device that lent him the impotent rage of a neutered cat. Every song was followed by a snotty, flippant “thanks, y’all” before the audience could clap, and the one time he actually made use of the guitar that had been dangling around his neck for twenty minutes, it was to perform a paint-by-numbers solo that a seven year-old could have played using his feet; this bit of nauseating self-indulgence was acknowledged by him shouting “respect that solo, y’all”. Somehow I repressed the urge to leap off the balcony and throttle him. You would think that this utter disaster of a solo project would be content with just a man, his laptop, and a guitar that said man didn’t know how to play, but alas, John Peña had found two other musicians to drag down with him. The guitarist seemed to be having a midlife crisis; tubby and unshaven, he took off his shoes and wandered around the stage in black tube socks for the duration of the performance. I was appalled—do I go to clubs in my jammies?—and so distracted by this display of exceptional ratchetness that I was temporarily unable to focus on how much I hated the music. From time to time the frumpy man would seem to play a guitar part, but it was completely drowned out by the burbling laptop mix. * Surprise! * Raz took the stage by storm again to lend some surprisingly competent and audible bass parts to the abysmal mêlée. He was much less terrible than before, earning the dubious title of Least Awful Person in Heavenly Beat. I hope performing before Small Black has been a learning experience for you. You christened your girly pink-covered album Talent; you have none. Heavenly Beat, you named yourself in the spirit of true hipster irony—the beat was barely discernable amidst the distortion from your laptop, and from what I heard it was certainly not heavenly. On to the main event. Small Black was good enough to erase all memories of past crimes against my eardrums. From the moment they appeared, the entire band possessed the genuine, infectious enthusiasm that I rarely see in live performances but always long for. Keyboardist Ryan Heyner and singer Josh Kolenik were dressed all in white; Kolenik bounced around his synthesizer in a continuous arc, showing off polished dance moves. He has a remarkable voice—high and clear, with great intonation, and though he danced vigorously through the entire set, it never faltered. His tremendous charisma was belied by the endearing way he thanked the audience and the sound engineer by his full name, and humbly announced how glad the band were to be home after a month-long tour. They were very grateful that so many Brooklynites had come out to see them. He led the band through a slick and synth-heavy tour of their catalog, heavy on extended versions of singles from their excellent new release Limits of Desire (“Free At Dawn”, “No Stranger”, “Sophie”, and “Limits of Desire”, to name a few), but pausing for a few older hits (“New Chain”, “Moon Killer”). Their sound—plush synths and muted beats, smattered with strummed guitar and elements of R&B—is too varied to be chillwave, too day-glo-lucid-dream-y to be indie. I was pleased at how even and immersive the mix was, with bass that rattled my molars but didn’t obscure the other elements of the music. Despite his unassuming stage presence, bassist Juan Pieczanski added enviably funky bass to shape the electronic haze. Drummer Jeff Curtin gamely trekked on, although he should have been mixed louder than he was. Everyone at times added harmonies or picked up a guitar to add a little extra; it was in this spirit that we all began to do our white-people dance moves, and the crowd became a sea of pumping fists.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 05:12:01 +0000
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