Saturday, March 5, 2011

Mountains of Moss/Cloudland Canyon/The Mutations/Big Bad Oven/NDN/Dumb Lunch/Fine Peduncle

All the above bands in two nights at Pilot Light. Quite a different atmosphere/sense of purpose/audience between Thursday and Friday nights, though there was some audience overlap. And if you consider Cloudland's Kip Uhlhorn is a former Knoxvillian, both nights were all-locals affairs. Some serious sounds going down all around.

Thursday's show actually felt more like two different shows, an "early" (start time @ 11:10 p.m. for a four band bill - that's pushing it even by PL standards) dreamy, droney set and a late rock set. I'm assuming Cloudland Canyon were dreamy and droney, they were the last two times I saw them, but I missed them this time around, as some of us were over at Backroom with former Knoxvillian, current Washingtonian (what a word) and soon to be Ithacan Tre Donn Berney, who was in visiting for a spell. I did catch Mountains of Moss' opening set, and wow but it was good. It always is, of course, but seemed to be especially so this time. The great thing about a set by Adam Ewing is you know it's always going to be worthwhile, but you never know exactly what he's going to do. It opened with the other current member of MoM, who I know I've met but whose name I'm ashamed to say I can't remember, laying down a nice drone while Adam fingerpicked a bit. The dual vocals sounded great, Adam's high-pitched keening blending well with the other guy's baritone, and other guy even sang one himself. I don't know if it was a song he wrote or not, but this performance felt more like a collaborative effort than a lot of past MoM shows have. Great stuff.

The Mutations are a new band with Cuts/Cheat/Dude Fuckin Whatever guitarist Harold Heffner and some other guys whose names I don't know. It was their first show but they already sound so good you'd never have guessed it. Granted it's not too far afield from the surf rock kind of stuff Harold's been doing for years, but I guess it's so second nature to him now it seems effortless. Not to single him out, the whole band was great. I especially like the slower number that sounds like it would fit comfortably on the Grease soundtrack. I so don't mean that as an insult.

Big Bad Oven burned the place down, of course. It was Josh Wright's birthday and everybody was in just the right mood for BBO's kind of mind melting activity. Could a trio of drums, saxophone and homemade lap slide guitar be the best rock band in Knoxville right now? Some nights, yes, and Thursday night was one of them.

Friday night was a whole other affair. I showed up around 11:30 and NDN was on stage. People were talking pretty loudly and I myself got caught up in a stop and chat by the front door, so I couldn't really hear what he was doing. I think he was rapping, or somesuch.

Dumb Lunch. Wow. What to say about these guys. They're a sort of conceptual prankster take on Top 40 hip-hop, and while the raps, all centered around blunts, drinking, more blunts and an egregious amount of anal-insertion references, were briefly amusing in a so bad it's good kind of way, they got old pretty quick for me. I mean some of Lil B's stuff is along those lines and he's not trying to be funny, plus he can actually rap when he wants to. Besides which the greatest parody of a thing is itself, so what's the point? But I dug the music, which was four guys playing some combination of laptops/iPads/drum machines, I couldn't really see because they were sitting on the floor, but even the higher tech stuff sounded kind of primitive. I though they were improvising but Chris Rusk, who played with them, swore they were pre-arranged songs. It sounded like a holy mess to me, in a good way, not in a noise for the sake of noise, tripping all over each other way, but a weird, loosely connected exploratory way. It reminded me somewhat of Black Dice's last couple of records or even parts of Royal Trux's Twin Infinitives and Hand of Glory. But mostly I didn't have much of a context for it, which is usually a good experience.

Fine Peduncle closed out the night. His recordings are great, but his live show makes what he does so much more impressive. If you haven't seen Cole Murphy perform, you can get an idea about what he does in my Metro Pulse article, some parts of which I already have second thoughts about, which I'll get into in a later post. But his voice is flat-out incredible, and last night he played a batch of songs from his new EP, which demanded a lot more from his falsetto than normal. It's amazing to watch, and I wonder how often he can do that and keep his voice intact. Like if he ever goes on tour, can he do that night after night? We may find out soon; I've never heard so many people independently of one another so convinced that someone local is destined for great things, especially someone who's only been performing about a year. If the right well-connected person hears him, or he gets a bigger platform, like Bonnaroo or Moogfest, he's bound to get national attention. Soak it up now while he's still playing PL to sizable but still comfortably manageable crowds.

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