So the saying goes, there's a first time for everything. This past Saturday night was my first time at a show alone. Not bad, just new. It left a lot of time for thumb-twiddling and eavesdropping.
"It was at the Gibson Amphitheater and Genesis was there."
"Genesis?"
"Yeah, man. Genesis. It was so loud I had to go to the bathroom and stuff my ears with tissue."
And after a moment of awed, respectful silence the other dude humbly responded, "Gnarly."
Sometimes when I think about post-rock, especially this particular branch of post-rock, which is brooding and atmospheric, I become quite convinced that all the prog-heads from the past reincarnated to this new romanticism of rock, carrying over the same sensibility for flourish and complexity and deeply ambitious orchestral meditations—except louder. It's progressive rock for the restless, keeping the density and bringing in the distress.
With that said, I found it strange that pop-rocking Texans Oh No! Oh My! were selected to open for and shared a fan base with Mew considering how different the two bands sound. But the evening kick-started successfully with ON!OM! in 45-minutes of upbeat, knee-jerking, rocking out. Judging from the spectrum of sound (towards which I felt either rapt or bored with no middle ground) it seemed to me that ON!OM! were tossed in terms of their next musical approach and their set for the evening showed these changing tides. Pumped with creativity, ON!OM! boasted in spots throughout the night some strikingly unconventional vocals. The lead vocalist Greg Barkley sang it gruff and telling like Jeff Mangum, flanked by shouts from guitarists and jacks-of-all-trades Daniel Hoxmeier and Tim Regan, to show ON!OM! pulsing out some complex and energetic pop by loosening free powerful undercurrents of dissonance and dramatics. A guest, Jesse from The Deadly Syndrome, swung the accordion in a few slower and wonderful medleys. However, with lyrics such as "I wish I were a monster," drummer Joel Calvin takes the mic and skips about stage in an awkward display of grade-school wishfulness. Do you reeeally want to be a monster? You're going to be slobbery and pretty scary looking with big teeth and lots of unruly hair. Sometimes the cute stuff falls flat as being childish and insincere and I just didn't buy it. Vacillating between the bubble-gum pitched shallow pop and wonderfully lugubrious Weezer-like self-deprecation, ON!OM! juggled musical styles, each tugging at the lads of ON!OM! towards either typical playground pop or something more compelling and exciting. However, the night wasn't that complicated. Simply put best by Barkley when he shout-suggested to the crowd, "You should probably clap," ON!OM! kept it energetic and bouncy all night, shaking their own beards and coifs on stage and bringing those on the floor to do the same.
When I first heard of Mew, it was while in the process of making the word "frengers" a household term. Combining the words "friend" and "stranger" to describe… well, a frenger, a couple of frengers and I talked about the genius of the word and its matchless applicability. I thought that this band Mew must be awesomely funny to be naming albums after this stuff. The frengers in company informed me otherwise: Mew has no sense of humor, they are dead serious.
While waiting for Mew begin, I got a sense for the Danish quartet's huge cross-continental success. Although I'm not much of a space rock or post-rock fan, people who love this stuff love it all the way and the Fonda was a packed house with anticipation at an electric peak. One blast of guitar crunch from behind drawn curtains set the crowd wild, and out rolled Mew with a bang. The whole band dressed in either black or white, and all the instruments went wireless, clean and without a coiled extension cord in sight. The stage looked like a pristine gallery space. Despite the amped-up drums and the thick wall of guitar and bass, Mew's central sound comes from the dulcet melodies of the high-pinched synth and the similar timbres of the vocals that step off from this piano laden soundscape. The show was accompanied by background illustrations created by lead singer himself, Jonas Bjerre. My most salient memory from these projections is of a cat wearing a Civil War era soldier's uniform and playing a fiddle while flying through a forest. Bjerre describes these images as nightmares he grapples with night after night. Mew carried this over in waking states and sloshed full with this swollen angst. Their set was histrionic enough to imply that the grandest statement they wanted to make that night was death. Maybe uplifting death, but death nonetheless. Mew definitely got their point across about the apocalyptic and the tortured, but I wonder if it's well done or even interesting to say. If anything, it's funny. The cat is funny. Despite all my criticism and incredulity about Mew's performance, the fans were throwing their hands in the air, pointing furiously, pumping fists and showing luv all throughout their set. Towards the end of the night for the first time in my life I wimped out and whipped out the ear plugs. Genesis? Yeah right. Bring it on, Mew.
