PIANOS BECOME THE TEETH live at The Space. Hamden CT. 2.25.12
Shows like the one I saw last night don’t happen every day in Connecticut. Actually, shows like last night probably don’t happen every day anywhere. But every once in a while — maybe only a handful of times in a given year — the punk stars align and the necessary pieces fall into place for a truly stacked punk rock show here in the Nutmeg State. The show last night wasn’t particularly momentous on paper — no bands on the bill were breaking up or reuniting, no major records were being released that night — but with the energy in the room and the musical powerhouses on stage, it certainly felt like a big deal. To strengthen my point, the last ‘normal’ local show I can point to that held the same sort of atmosphere happened almost a full year ago, when My Heart To Joy played in New Haven with Pianos Become The Teeth, Transit, The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die and Fugue. Incidentally, two of those same bands were featured on the bill last night.
After some uncertainty about bands arriving on time and a slight beginning delay, the new haven group Wess Meets West came onstage and opened the show. Readers of this blog should be familiar with their relentless and aggressive brand of mostly instrumental post-rock, as I’ve covered them extensively in the past, but for those of you who aren’t, I highly suggest listening to their newest record Chevaliers, which took the #14 spot on my Top Albums of 2011 list. This show was the second of theirs that I’ve seen since the release of that record, and although they lacked the manpower that they displayed at their record release show back in December, they still worked fairly well with their traditional 3-piece lineup. The performances were a little sloppy, and the largely hardcore-prone audience didn’t seem to totally understand what the band was doing, but to me, the songs themselves were good enough to make the experience worthwhile.
Next up were The Saddest Landscape, a veteran screamo group that seemed decidedly more aligned with the crowd’s general music tastes. Despite the band’s unequivocally hardcore musical aesthetic, frontman Andy Maddox surprisingly revealed himself to be quite an indie rock nerd before their set, humming the opening bars of Weezer’s “My Name Is Jonas” during soundcheck and complimenting a crowd member on his new Cursive t-shirt. From the beginning of the set, however, The Saddest Landscape were all business. Their performance was incredibly tight and energetic, revealing a dedication to performing and a musical prowess that was impossible to overlook. It was a powerful reminder of just how long this band has been active (nearly a full decade, which is practically a lifetime in punk years), which is something that many probably don’t realize, given the amount of hype that exclusively surrounded their past two records exclusively. Their highlight performances bookended the set; You Will Not Survive’s opener “Declaring War On Nostalgia” got things off to an energetic start, while “Eternity Is Lost On The Dying” provided a vocal chord-shredding singalong closer. Songs from their stellar new record After The Lights also sounded excellent in the live setting, especially the opening track “In Love With The Sound,” which Maddox dedicated to the headlining band that night.
With two bands down and three more to go, I was pleasantly reminded of the fact that The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die were on the bill last night. I’ve seen this band so many times at this point that I’ve actually started relying on their live shows the way that someone less musically-inclined might rely on comfort food. Their shows are consistently very good, almost never truly ‘great’, but that’s just fine for me because I know that there will almost always be another one on the horizon in the coming months. Case in point: they’re playing this exact same venue midway through April with Into It. Over It., and I’m actually scheduled to open for it. The issues that consistently plague their shows are entirely forgivable and almost exclusively technical. I predicted prior to their set that something would go wrong, and sure enough, something did; their bass head completely died very early on in the set at perhaps the most inopportune moment imaginable.
The band had just begun playing an extended ambient intro when Flaming Tsunamis/Swear Jar member Chris Zizzamia took the stage and began reciting a poem, which, according to Greg Horbal, he had written just hours before the performance. His moving spoken word piece ended with a direct reference to one of TWIABP’s songs — “I will be okay. Everything will be okay.” Zizzamia said, “I will be okay. Everything…”
With that, the band launched into “Eyjafjallajokull Dance,” nailing the first two verses and inciting the crowd in a way that I had never seen them do before. It was utterly beautiful and overwhelmingly powerful… and then the bass cut out. It was a tremendously depressing moment for everyone in attendance. Thankfully, the band made up for it once they switched out the bass head, performing a handful of other great tracks from their discography. It seems that every time I see them, the crowd is more and more engaged, and last night was no exception. “Gordon Paul” unsurprisingly elicited the greatest response from the crowd, but the highlight for me came at the very end. As “Victim Kin Seek Suit” exploded into its anthemic second half, the preternaturally shy frontman Tom Diaz launched himself into the crowd and sang the last few words with the audience. I wrapped my arms around him and shouted into the mic with a crowd of equally devoted TWIABP fans, and at that moment I felt at home. I never expected that level of comfort from him, and I’m actually quite proud.
At the time, I would have been content with the night ending after TWIABP’s set. Thankfully, it didn’t. In accordance with the laws of punk rock, Pianos’ tourmates Xerxes were slated for the sub-headliner spot, despite not having garnered much of a following up here in the north. As I quickly learned, the Louisville, KY-based band plays a strain of emotive hardcore in line with such groups as Touché Amoré. Like many of the attendees that night, I didn’t go in with great expectations of Xerxes, but I soon learned that I should have been paying more attention when people recommended them to me in the past.
Although looks certainly don’t account for everything, there is definitely something to be said for Xerxes’ visual aesthetic. Whether it was intended or not, the band members all came onstage wearing color-coded black and white clothes with starkly matching instruments. I won’t mince words here; they looked fucking badass. Fortunately, they had a sound to match it. Although their vocalist looked like he was practically seventeen, he screamed and shouted with all the aggression of the most grizzled hardcore frontman. Furthermore, although I initially scoffed at the band bringing in their own bass head and cab for the show, it turned out to be absolutely essential; the bass guitar rumbled with doom-metal intensity, while the two guitarists provided a searing underpinning for the band’s brief hardcore anthems.
The only real problem I had with Xerxes’ set actually had little to do with the band itself. It was a problem that plagued the sets of most of the bands that night, but one that was especially bothersome during this one. Some kid — I don’t know who he was, but I know it was one particular person — was instigating an incredibly obnoxious forced circle pit in the middle of the room, and throwing himself around inside it evidently just for the fun of it, at the expense of almost everyone else in attendance. If you’ve ever been to The Space, you probably understand that this is not the venue for those kind of moshpits, nor is this music the kind that warrants them. Xerxes is not a ‘tough guy hardcore’ band. This wasn’t a ‘tough guy hardcore’ show. This kid wasn’t even a ‘tough guy,’ so there was absolutely no legitimate reason for him to disrupt the somber and emotional atmosphere of the show with his bullshit antics. I’m not sure if it was the aggressiveness of the music or just the level of obnoxiousness, but I was very angry by the end of Xerxes’ set. Thankfully, that only enhanced the power of the group’s music.
The set change provided me with some time to cool off, as many of the other attendees and I prepared ourselves for what was sure to be an emotionally draining headlining set from Pianos Become The Teeth. The last time I saw Pianos was over a year ago, at the previously mentioned New Haven show. Since then, they have matured a lot as a band, both in the studio and, as I found out, in the live setting. Their 2011 record The Lack Long After, which placed at #40 on my Top Albums list, has been getting a lot of plays from me recently, as the album is generally centered around the universal theme of loss. I was pleased to hear plenty of the newer material during their set because of all the attention I’ve been giving that record lately, and I found that I was able to engage with the band on a more personal and active level than I was last year.
It was clear that most of the crowd shared my sentiments, as the Pianos crowd last night was as energetic and engaged as almost any audience I’ve seen. It was also evident that the band recognized the level of engagement; Kyle Durfey even took the opportunity to thank the crowd for being so great at multiple times throughout the set.
The band itself sounded excellent, with a particularly propulsive rhythm section that really highlighted the post-rock aspects of their sound; however, the best part of the show for me was not how tight they sounded, but how much the emotions expressed in the lyrics and music resonated with me in the live atmosphere. I’m not going to suggest that the loss I experienced recently even comes close to Durfey’s loss of his own father, but at that time and place, as I shouted Durfey’s words back into his face, I felt for the first time that someone genuinely understood how I felt and recognized that my pain was valid. It’s a sentiment that, to me, represents this style of music at its very best. When someone can capture the intensity of his or her emotions with such efficiency, and then convey it via brilliant art, that’s when that person has truly succeeded in his or her artistic pursuits. I hope that Durfey felt validated by his performance last night, and by the rest of his performances on this tour, because he certainly deserves to. As a listener and concert-goer, I personally felt validated in a way that I haven’t in a long time, and for that, I think that Pianos Become The Teeth deserve my sincere personal thanks. As a critic, I believe that they deserve similarly high praise, but for slightly different reasons. From any perspective, it’s hard to fault this band’s performance last night. I’ll just close by saying that at no point in this year have I felt so right as I did singing along last night to their closing song “I’ll Get By,” in which everyone in the room (and seemingly everyone in the world) raised his/her hands to the sky and shouted out that same sentiment that we’ve all felt to some degree at one point or another: “I still feel the lack long after.” Now that the show’s over, I’m feeling a slightly different lack, but at least in this case, the memories haven’t gone sour.
8/10
