The main liability to the plethora of great musical acts playing 2011’s City Arts Fest was, well, the plethora of great musical acts playing 2011’s City Arts Fest.
I could go all glass half-empty and bemoan missing Seattle’s favorite garage-soul sons Pickwick Friday night. Or I could whinge interminably about the Fest’s (understandably) unpredictable rhythms making it impossible for me to hear the mighty Mudhoney punish eardrums at Neumos on Saturday. Hell, I would–if I hadn’t caught some amazing things anyway.
Brave souls who ventured out from CAF’s nucleus of Capitol Hill/downtown clubs on Friday to take in The Helio Sequence’s sold-out show at the Laser Dome reaped rich rewards: The Portland duo proved revelatory as live accompanists to a full-on laser show. Drummer/keyboardist Benjamin Weikel and guitarist Brandon Summers have always wrapped their considerable songwriting chops in layers of sound, and in this live setting the band pretty much eased up the busy electronic/analog duality of their recordings in favor of Summers’ textural guitar and Weikel’s incredibly musical time-keeping.
The resulting swirl of sound rendered the most evocative laser-show visuals sublime; and when the streaks and shapes of light and color threatened to get cheesy, the band made for a compelling audio-visual focus. Weikel–all lanky staccato motion and jackhammer force–reinforced his standing one of the most energetic and watchable drummers in the Northwest, and Summers’ John-Lennon-cum-Dylan-gone-shoegazer voice provided perfect compliment to his cabinet of effects-pedal curiosities. If there’s another active band out there that generates a more harmonious blend of psychedelia, traditional rock, and new-wave oddness than these guys, I have yet to hear ‘em.
Saturday night, meantime, felt like the Night of the Underdog at Chop Suey, with four terrific rock acts playing their hearts out to a sparse-but-enthusiastic house well into the wee hours. Odds are, you probably weren’t there; and if you weren’t, it was your loss.
The Fucking Eagles hail from the Underdog Capitol of the State (Tacoma), so their brand of garage rock felt as genuine and dirty-fingernailed as it was timeless. And with a line-up that included a harmonica player and two tambourine-slinging sirens alongside their guitars/bass/drum foundation, their compact tunes buzzed with the loose-limbed fervor of a soul revue. The imperfect sound mix muddied up things some (that harp got lost in the din), but the band played too ferociously to give a shit.
Virgin Islands contrasted things with songs that punched just as hard, but with more precision–post-punk rabbit punches to The Fucking Eagles’ old-school rock-and-roll coldcock. Frontman Michael Jaworski probably didn’t endear himself to Fest organizers with his references to ‘the Shitty Farts Fest,’ but his goofing leavened the socio-political intensity of his vocal attack, and even in the stark directness of VI’s delivery, all sorts of cool touches surfaced: Christopher Meyer’s shards of broken-glass guitar squealing, Jaworski’s and bassist Charles Keller’s persuasively-barked vocal harmonies, and Keller’s and drummer Aaron Ball’s whiplash-inducing rhythm section delivered, big-time.
It’s always great to see a band totally march to the beat of their own drummer, and Unnatural Helpers did that, literally. Singer/drummer Dean Whitmore is a real original, a baby-faced pounder with an endearing scream/yelp that comes on like Black Francis at a greasy beer-soaked house party, and his songs combine punk-rock spit with a throbbing go-go backbeat. I couldn’t name the other current members of the Helpers’ line-up (Whitmore’s band’s roster has included at least a dozen different hired guns over the last few years), but they did his great tunes rough justice Saturday night.
England’s Male Bonding finished things out with a set that rocked as enjoyably as the rest of the night’s local-grown acts, but with a nicely tart limey (sorry) twist. It’s easy to see why their US label Sub Pop’s fallen so hard for ‘em: their brand of sugar-buzz guitar pop packs a gaggle of irresistible touchstones (The Kinks, Teenage Fanclub, The Buzzcocks) into a bundle of youthful energy and sunny harmonies. If a band like this does this sort of thing wrong, they sound as quaint as a dusty rock reference book; but if they do it right, they knock the cobwebs off with life-affirming joy. And damned if I wasn’t grinning wide enough to split my face open after Male Bonding finished their set. Consider me smitten.
