I showed up at Columbia City Theater, having never been before, somewhat in a huff. My imagined sprint from work to home to show was forced into a limping crawl by the flood of weekend tourism traffic, I was wearing the same clothes I wore wrangling children earlier in the day, had nothing but some OJ and mac-n-cheese on my stomach, and sat down on a stool in the back only to discover that I had left my camera at home and my pen was running out of ink.
As I debated the prudence of complementing my small dinner with a strong drink, I noticed a couple of the members of Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band lurking above the stage and suddenly realized I didn’t care if I was hungry and would have to take terrible quality pictures with my terrible phone or if my ability to write this review was inhibited by the illegible scratches of my dying pen, because I was about to see one of my favorite local bands play a live set. Right on.
I went home that evening thoroughly musically blessed. The event, organized by Sound On The Sound, not only served to launch MSHVB’s fantastic new EP, Prehistory, but also introduced me to Olympia-based You Are Plural and confirmed all the good things I had heard about Wintersleep, Juno Award winners from Halifax, Nova Scotia, providing me with two new bands to add to my list of “Things I Like A Lot.”
You Are Plural pairs a masterfully wielded cello (via Jen Grady) with an aggressively manipulated synth (via Ephriam Nagler), sealing the deal with Grady’s unwavering and clear vocal range set alongside Nagler’s delicate falsetto for a layered and diverse sound that appropriately demonstrates a duality echoed in the band’s name.
A few songs in their set (example) could have been quickly described as “pretty voices with upbeat sounds,” but as the duo progressed into some of their newer material, the depth of structure became much more emphasized. There are a lot of moments when the music builds to a point of near cacophony, each instrument and voice competing to be heard, but instead of erupting into chaos, the music leaps into a complex agreement with itself (try “Not Backwards At Coming Forwards”).
You Are Plural’s sound is pleasantly unexpected – just as you ease into the pattern of any given song, it evolves and hooks right or digresses completely. But rather than becoming startled or alienated by a sudden musical development or shift, you immediately realize how right it is and that these are musicians who can be trusted to push any song to its full potential.
The next band, Wintersleep, was a bit of an enigma. At this point in the show, I was starting to suffer an allergy-induced headache, so when a bunch of dudes from Canada got up on stage and started playing a thousand guitars while a bearded dude played tambourine and sang, I grumpily wrote “buncha dudes, lots of noises, sounds like most other bands with a buncha dudes and lots of noises.”
For this initial and hasty judgement, I would like to apologize, because once my NameBrandMedication kicked in and I actually started paying attention to what was happening on the stage in front of me, I realized that I not only liked Wintersleep but that I was having significant difficulty figuring out how to describe the way they sounded.
Obviously the terms “indie” and “rock” would make an appearance somewhere, but dubbing a band’s sound as “indie rock” is like saying “meat and plants” when someone asks you what you like to eat.
During their performance, I attempted to describe their sound as “early Placebo dipped in country for like half a second, then washed clean and spritzed with harmonic folk,” which I then revised, after listening to some of their earlier work, to “early Placebo dipped in country for like half a second, then washed clean and spritzed with harmonic folk, after hanging out at a 90s alt rock show, but in Canada.”
So.
If anyone has any idea what any of that means, feel free to use it as a guideline but, for what I suspect is the majority of you, it’s honestly going to be much easier to listen and decide for yourselves.
Closing out the night was, of course, MSHVB. Since they began doing their thing in 2008, they’ve been one of my favorite local bands to see live, due to the fact that I’ve never seen them perform less than wonderfully.
As someone who’s seen quite a few bands have good days and bad days, I can appreciate the consistency MSHVB offers: they always take the stage with confidence and pleasure, slipping into guitar straps and adjusting pedals like they’ve been doing it for decades, and deliver a show with the smooth, measured energy of practiced professionals. And Friday night was no exception.
If you weren’t knowledgeable of the band’s discography or aware that the show was an EP release, it’s likely you wouldn’t have been able to tell songs like “Hollywood” and “Best Bet” were new – there were no noticeable errors or hesitations; the new material was performed with as much accuracy and spirit as it was recorded with.
It’s this combination of dedication and talent that makes Mt St Helens Vietnam Band one of my favorites to watch and listen to, that makes every note sound hand-crafted and every crescendo deliberately designed.
