Cathy Hsiao of The Missionaries and Kids In Love braved the snow for TVD NYC to bring us this wonderful review of last night’s Amen Dunes and Gary War show at Shea Stadium.
I discovered Amen Dunes the way all good music is discovered: at night, hanging out and having a record thrown on for you. In this case the record was Faust’s So Far, but in the midst of conversion my roommate also mentioned Amen Dunes. As is usually the case, he’s right on. DIA, Damon McMahon, aka Amen Dunes’ 2009 debut (Locust) is a keeper, the kind of thing you want to hear when you’re as cold inside as it is outside and maybe you like it that way. You can hear the Catskills Mountain on the album, where he went in 2006 to record. Common comparisons strike one anywhere from a more drugged-up, slowed down Kurt Vile to one of my personal favorites, the Bay Area’s Gowns (RIP) or further afield, Amps for Christ.
And because nothing transmits dissonant dark-wave quite like a frigid Brooklyn night on a desolate warehouse – lined street, when the part – time Beijing resident played a show at Shea Stadium with Gary War, I decided to brave the cold. Bushwick’s Shea Stadium has all the requisite trappings of a good Brooklyn DIY spot, from the unmarked entrance to the eerie glow cast by the dim green and red lights that bathed the space. Many of their shows are also online now at their archive.
One of the more interesting elements of DIA is what McMahon does with his voice, the way he sometimes manipulates words into sheer notes with his deliberately? off-kilter singing, like in the heartbreaker of a closer, aptly titled “Breaker.” Rhythmic finger picking often descend into pools of repetitive distortion on songs such as “White Lace,” showcasing McMahon’s ability to walk the line between psych-folk and shit-gaze. Live, his voice takes on more of a yearning quality, more solo Syd Barrett channeled through heavy pedal action and vox reverb, meandering through the wild on LSD as in those famous home videos. A song like “Castle” on DIA very much recalls Barrett’s “Terrapin.” It was also nice to hear some vulnerably pitched singing rather than the usual whispered or flattened-out vocals on top of all that feedback. Amen Dunes as a duo achieve a full sound even on the one or two songs where there were some harmonic kinks between the Yamaha and the guitar. McMahon noted that it was the first time the two of them played together and they ended with a drenched, mournful bliss-out closer that capped a great set.
My one complaint is that just like perennial DIY diehard space Death By Audio, Shea Stadium’s indoor smokiness factor is pretty terrible, especially for those nursing winter colds. So much so that it and the late start of Gary War, whose new EP Police Water just came out on Sacred Bones, forced me to go back out into the night and trek home, missing all of their set. I did have a chance to see them almost exactly a year ago on another snowed in blizzardy show with Brooklyn’s Babies and Coasting and there they were on point. War’s 2009 release New Raytheonport is available in its entirety at Free Music Archive, a curated online music library maintained by the good folks over at WFMU.
So the shows go on in Brooklyn even as the snows keep coming on. And in true DIY fashion there will always be someone there documenting and distributing out of love and for your listening pleasure, most likely for free or at the very least, on the cheap.
