This weekend I saw the bassist of Alkaline Trio, The Decemberists, and The Appleseed Cast. No, there wasn’t an indie-rock extravaganza you missed, I just have too much time on my hands.
The events began with an expedition of two friends and I to Schuba’s, off of the Belmont stop, for a late performance by Dan Andriano, the bassist of the darkly punk-rock band Alkaline Trio. We arrived only to realize that Andriano wouldn’t be the only one playing.
Maritime, a band comprised of members of The Promise Ring and The Dismemberment Plan, two mid-nineties emo bands that paved the way for the genre’s future-success, opened with a performance that demonstrated its members still had it, maybe more now than ever before. Sure, some songs were a little generic, offering little more than catchy guitar riffs and inoffensive vocals; however, songs like “Tearing Up the Oxygen” and “Calm” combined just the right amounts of interesting, high-pitched vocals with driving drum beats that could get anyone bobbing their head, even three guys drenched in rain and burping burrito smells.
After they finished their set, Andriano came onstage. Equipped with only an acoustic guitar, he explained he’d be playing a mixture of Trio songs as well as some originals he’d written. Now, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the crowd went wild for every song Andriano played. When it comes to solo performances at Schuba’s, you know the people watching are the die-hard fans ofthe area. However, translating fast, pop-punk songs like the Trio’s into acoustic ballads can’t be easy, and that’s why I’ve got to give Andriano credit. Steering clear of the ultra-fast and angry songs in his Trio repertoire like “I Lied My Face Off” and “This is Getting Over You,” Andriano cleverly stuck to his slower, if not more melodic songs like “Another Innocent Girl” and “Smoke.”
The thing is that Andriano has never stopped improving as a singer or a musician. And it shows. His voice sounds more confident and full than it did on the original track recordings of the songs he played, and mixing that with the sincerity and intimacy that comes with an acoustic performance caused the experience to exceed even the biggest fan’s expectations. When Andriano ended his set dedicating his romantic (despite the title) “Every Thug Needs a Lady” to Ja Rule, I’m sure I heard a few heads explode in sheer joy, but that may have just been the rain drizzling onthe rooftop.
Less than twenty-four hours later, I was back on the “L” headed towards the Riviera, a large, comfy venue about a block away from the Aragon (another venue) at the Lawrence stop. It was here thatI’d be seeing The Decemberists. It was also here I’d meet Alisdair Roberts, the opener of the night and possibly the shyest musician ever.
“The last time I found it to be schizophrenigenic,” Roberts says of his last tour of America. “Unable to tell whether I was insane or the place was insane or everyone around me was but there seemed to be something slightly psychotic about everything that was happening.”
This is the Scottish folk-singer and guitarist’s third trip here, and afterwards he’s planning to go to the north coast of Scotland and live alone in a cabin. But don’t get the wrong idea – he doesn’t think America’s as crazy this time around. He says he’s enjoyed watching the long, entertaining show The Decemberists put on, and he’s enjoyed playing in the larger venues touring with a high-profile band like The Decemberists have led him to. Not that he has to explain it, as it’s all-to-clear when he gets onstage. Though Roberts hardly speaks above a whisper while being interviewed (and later says he admires “Singers quietly and modestly doing an important thing”),when he plays there’s a tremendous amount more energy involved. With two other musicians backing him up, Roberts seems to easily pick out traditional British folk guitar lines and sing over them with a voice made unique both by his accent and his range. Yeah, it’s folk, and yeah, Roberts does come off as quiet and modest, but when he plays live it still rocks, if only a little bit.
The venue was completely filled when Roberts finished, with the pit beginning in front of the stage and extending the about fifty yards back to the entrance doors.
And it was time for The Decemberists. They came out dressed in old-fashioned suits, a stand-up bass and an accordian in addition to the more traditional rock instruments (you know, a guitar and a drum set), and launched into “Leslie Ann Levine.” Lead singer and guitarist Colin Meloy seemed to tacitly acknowledge that people wanted to hear the older hits first like “Engine Driver” and “We Both Go Down Together” before launching into the new material off of The Crane Wife, which just came out this past October.
However, fans were pleasantly surprised by how good the new stuff sounded, and even more pleased by how capable the band was of keeping people listening through songs that clocked in atabout twelve minutes long, like “The Crane Wife 1 & 2” and “The Island.” Something about Meloy’s laid-back demeanor despite the length and certainly the power of his acoustic-guitar driven songs had a profound effect on the crowd and made the performance one of the best I’ve seen since…well…the night before. Meloy had the audience singing at two points during the night, and at one point had members of his band act out the battle scene from The Hobbit in the pit in front of the stage. And that’s how you know indie-rock is for nerds. The lovable kind, that is.
Sunday night marked the last of my concerts for the epic weekend. This meant seeing The Appleseed Cast, perhaps one of the most powerful rock bands ever. However, it also meant going to the Metro, which I’m finding less and less fulfilling with every visit. The security guards are mean, there’s very limited available seating, and there’s no moshing, crowd surfing, or fun allowed in the pit.
Anyway, before the band went on, I caught up with Aaron Pillar, the band’s guitarist, and one of the only members who’s been in it since it began about ten years ago. Pillar explained, among other things the history of the band, the difficulty of keeping a drummer, the impact of Kansas ontheir music, and, most importantly, how they make them guitars sound so good.
“We want to try something different,” Pillar said, “The Low Level thing was really seeing what we could do.” The Low Levels Pillar refers to are the Low Level Owl albums The Appleseed Cast released in 2001. These were two albums they released together that clocked in at about two hours of music and marked the band’s transcendence from a Sunny Day Real Estate-esque emo-band to innovators of a kind of atmospheric music that truly does an amazing job evoking a feeling.
“We’re sort of a spontaneous band,” he said. Pillar then explained how when recording each album, the band realized they had a limited time to make art, and figured they should use that time to it’s fullest.
“For that week you’re in a studio,” Pillar explained, “Why not make it the coolest thing you can do and not be safe?”
Observing Pillar’s boldness in conversation was nothing like observing the boldness of the band in concert. The Appleseed Cast play a kind of emo-driven music that just can’t be categorized with any other emo-band. There’s no hardcore screaming, only timid yet powerful singing from guitarist and singer Chris Crisci. There’s no thrash-sounding guitar chords; instead there are intricate guitar lines made even more complex and full-sounding by the different tones they take on depending on the song. These two aspects fuse with the tight, almost melodic sound of the drums and the jazz-like bass lines to create a kind of rock music that really gets inside the listeners. The band played some all-instrumental numbers as well as some of their catchier, vocal songs like “Steps and Numbers,” and when they finished everybody held out for an encore before realizing it wouldn’t come.
Thinking back on it, I re
alize each show I saw over the weekend worked it’s way up in degrees of intensity. Andriano was intimate and alone, The Decemberists were jolly and talented, and The Appleseed Cast were a powerful sound. So, all in all, it was a pretty excellent few nights.
Reach Jacob Nelson at [email protected].
