There’s been a lot of talk in the “indie” music universe about the solitude that dominates a lot of today’s music production. Mass-available, um, instruments (that word now shifting back to its broader connotation as “tool” or “implement”), like the sampler and DigiTech’s ubiquitous JamMan have collapsed the band into the artist.
It seems like there are two popular glosses on the phenomenon of the solitary “bedroom project,” each, as a lot of music crit tends to be, a sort of jeremiad.
The first notion is that these lone loopers are pseudo-artists, churning out a sort of bastardization of good old rock ‘n’ roll. And the distinction might be a fine one.
At Tuesday night’s BMore Musically Informed-/Sonar-presented concert at Golden West Cafe, New Jersey’s Ducktails, the one-man project of Matthew Mondanile (also a member of Real Estate), opened himself to such criticism.
Working with a mic, occasional guitar, an old couple-dozen-keyed Casio, a mixer and a sampler, Ducktails delivered a short, sample-heavy set.
What was most notable, perhaps, were the songs on which Mondanile didn’t actually play anything, instead intoning murkily simple melodies over pre-recorded pieces or samples of what sounded like entire bands (including a sample of, for all you former Hebrew-schoolers out there, Kaveret’s “Yo Ya”).
Though not quite as obnoxiously as an art school student presenting a blank canvas, the performance sort of egged on the audience to answer what sort of live presentation actually constitutes a performance.
The drums-bass-guitar-vocals traditionalists would have been pissed.
And then there’s Dustin Wong, egging everybody on in a different way.
Hunched low on the foot-high stage, invisible to all but the front row of spectators, Wong opened the night with his heavily layered, dramatic electric guitar constructions.
Wong’s use of his half-dozen pedals and single guitar isn’t all that unconventional, but his aesthetic marks him clearly as a very Baltimorean incarnation of the lone-guitarist species.
There is a good deal of the interlocking arpeggios of Don Caballero in his music, and the expansiveness of Do Make Say Think’s “Goodbye Enemy Airship, The Landlord is Dead.”
But there’s also an insurgent joyfulness, Wong bumping up and down, crouching before his little phalanx of effects, often smiling, blissful, his Ponytail still shining deliberately through.
Which is weird if only insofar as to its status as a live experience.
Wong’s cinematic swells filled the small space of the Golden West, with Wong all but absent, hidden from view, almost divorced from the audience at the same time as consuming them in sound.
Which brings us to that second pre-nominate jeremiad: the Internet is tearing us apart.
There’s been a good deal said (though perhaps still not yet enough) about how we are becoming a nation of ones, solipsistically cut off from each other, hunched behind computer screens.
And there’s some truth to that, certainly. But there’s also the sort of Luddite impulse to oppose tech, as anti-nature, anti-humanist, without appropriate, considered qualification.
It seems like the upshot of this as it applies to contemporary independent music is that the “bedroom project” isn’t necessarily all that different from the author writing alone, often presented alone (there aren’t many activities more solitary than that of reading), but celebrated communally.
And then there was Woods. The native Brooklynites, hailed as Neil Young revivalists, Grateful Dead and CSNY resurrectors, ended the night without much reference to that which preceded them.
The classic 60s-70s associations are a fair narrative imposed on the band, but not the only one.
Take, for instance, that the Neil Young comparisons are sort of misleading, in that Young’s high nasal voice isn’t of a kind with singer Jeremy Earl’s deliberate falsetto.
And that a lot of the texture of the group derives from their seated effects/tape-loop/whatever-ist singing into, sort of inexplicably, a pair of headphones.
There is the temptation to genre (as in, verb with object) Woods, and it’s helpful, one supposes, for album reviews and generating web “content” (more on that, too, in coming weeks), but it’s also helpful to remember that we are, in 2011, barely out of “rock ‘n’ roll”’s first half-century.
To call Woods revivalists is a misnomer; half a century in any art form doesn’t separate innovator from revivalist — it just constitutes a period.
It’s easy to see why the microfracturing of genres and periods is attractive to the critic: it adds infinite texture to his subject, each nanogenre coloring the field.
Woods is a rock band in a not-all-that-long line of rock bands.
Like Dustin Wong and Ducktails, Woods is a part of something greater — a continuation; neither the death or the end of a narrative, nor the beginning or revival of one.
