Emo from the Get-Up Kids; Alt-Country in Glasgow; Elastica at the Bowery Ballroom
You've gotta hand it to Louise. Straight off, she called it. "I have a feeling we're going to run into people we know tonight."
I was dubious. "Please. It's the Get Up Kids. We'll be the oldest people there."
"You'll be the oldest person there," said Louise. She's a few years younger than I am.
We're waiting for the light to change at Bowery and Delancey and there's a misty rain falling. You can't feel it; you wouldn't even know it's rain unless you checked against the streetlamps. Louise has her umbrella open but I'm out in the air. A cab pulls up in front of us and a man gets out, dressed like a boy. Obviously, he's here for the show. He's peeking around the corner of Louise's umbrella at me, so I permit myself a long look. Sometimes I mistrust my ability to recognize people I've met. As I get older, everyone looks familiar. But I know this guy. From? I'm reconstructing? College. He was the roommate of my friend Nick?who goes out with Louise? who's standing next to me. New York is so small.
"Erin?"
"Fish?"
"Hey!" I have to introduce Fish to Louise and explain their common link to Nick. We head into the Bowery Ballroom and almost immediately smack into more people from college. We embrace, smile; updates on people about whom I have only fuzzy memories: married, married, law school, Web developer, married, business school, married. I get cred for being a music writer?"I knew you'd never sell out." Sell out? I never bought in. But they're good people. We discuss all the shows we're going to and all the ones we've seen. We've been to all the same shows, isn't it crazy we never bumped into each other before? Finally the Anniversary come on and mercifully end our small talk.
The band is tight, and even though the fans don't seem to know the songs off the kick-ass Designing a Nervous Breakdown, they're all about 18 years old and just excited to be at an emo show. The imprimatur of the Get Up Kids is enough for them. The Get Up Kids are a little cottage industry in the emo scene. They have their own subsidiary label, Heroes & Villains, and an unending supply of side projects, of which Reggie and the Full Effect and the New Amsterdams are the latest. They hate to be called "emo," which should just prove to you how emotional they are. I know a guy who's so steeped in the ethos that when his girlfriend cries he tells all his friends that she's going all "eem" on him.
When the Get Up Kids take the stage the crowd surges forward in response to the band's tremendous enthusiasm. Whatever else you may say, they put on a great show. Because there are five of them, at any given time one of them is spazzing out, usually keyboardist James Dewees. He jumps, makes faces, does silly macarena imitations and generally gets in the way. The chaos is good for the spectacle. The band plays straight renditions of hits from last year's Something to Write Home About. My friends and I begin to dance but we're the only ones; all the younger fans are too self-conscious.
Despite being a force in the generally insular, white, Midwestern emo scene, the Get Up Kids manage to reference hiphop in their songs: on "Action & Action" the bridge lyrics are "I'm down for/ what-ev-er." It's parsed and delivered differently from the same line in the classic Ice Cube song, and, before this show, I always harbored suspicions that they didn't know they were quoting Ice Cube. But late in the show, when the band plays its "Don't Hate Me," guitarist Jim Suptic launches into a perfect version of the Eminem rap from Dr. Dre's "Forgot About Dre"?"Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got something to say but nothin' comes out when they move their lips just a bunch of gibberish motherfuckers act like they forgot about Dre"?recalibrated to the emo beat. Most of the kids don't get it.
Suptic is so obviously drunk that even the other Get Up Kids are fucking with him. But he's jolly about it, and addresses the crowd: "How many people here tonight are in college?" A roar rises from the crowd and all the hands around us go up. Oh, come on, we're not that old. "I went to college for a year. And hell, let's be honest, all I did was smoke pot and get drunk." Cheering. Then he asks, "Who here knows the Replacements?" I scream, expecting to be part of the throng, but only three other people scream with me. They play a cover of "Beer for Breakfast" to blank stares.
While waiting for the encore, my friends and I begin exchanging e-mail addresses and punching one another's numbers into our cellphones. I know that I won't call them, but I also know that once you run into someone, you see them everywhere. To cut down on awkwardness the next time, I make nice. During the encore, frontman Matt Pryor gets all "eem" on us, saying, "Last year, last November, we played a show here, and I got engaged on those steps right over there." He points off to the backstage area. "And five or six weeks from now, I'm getting married."
I feel a little better. No, I don't.
Erin Franzman
Fillup Shack, for instance, marries a strong folkie twist and a touch of Terrapin Station-era Dead to a very strict interpretation of the high-lonesome school of country music. The songs that Shack played from his Calldown Music debut, Hipolit, rely heavily on traditional structures both musically and lyrically, so much so that you get the sense that you've seen him before, even when you haven't. His opening song, "Down Roads," was a good example of this; the vocal was deep-fried and the forceful strum was straight out of Jay Farrar's quieter Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt work. Shack's newer and unreleased stuff, on the other hand, demonstrated his ample potential for growth. Songs like "Bullet" ditched the paint-by-numbers songcraft for something more taut and rewarding, and a longish ballad called "Hole in the Ground" exploited that often-contrived metaphor in a way that freshened it considerably. He threw the audience a curve at the end of his set, blanketing Hank Williams' "Lost Highway" with fuzz, but his wonderful rendering of the song came through. Shack will merit a second look when he hits the record stores again.
Nadine takes a more refined and poppier tack. Their songs are artfully constructed, moody and vibrant by turns, and steeped deeply enough in the darker side of Neil Young to resist any easy-listening tag. Their latest, Lit Up from the Inside (Undertow), adopts a brighter and more bustling tone than did their first two releases, 1997's Back to My Senses and 1999's Downtown, Saturday. It's the kind of sound that should finally bring them a following in the States to match their already fervent European cult status.
On this night, Nadine eschewed its rhythm section in favor of a more delicate acoustic interplay between guitarist/vocalist Adam Reichmann and multi-instrumentalist Steve Rauner. Together, Reichmann and Rauner stripped down arrangements of "Angela" and "End of the Night" (both from Lit Up), erasing the former's triphop and the latter's ultra-pop sheen to reveal the ribs and sinews of the songs. There's a genuine strength to Nadine's songwriting that outpaces influence.
In fact, it's the same kind of sturdiness and purpose that attracted most of alt-country's audience to the music in the first place, even as bands like Nadine shed their trappings. On this night, Reichmann's sweet and plaintive voice found the intimacy and ache in a song like "Without a Reply," which has a bigger and bolder sound on record. (Think Roy Orbison, with a touch less drama and quirkiness.) Rauner colored each number tastefully with accordion, guitar or lap-steel, fleshing out arrangements and offering sharp counterpoints. The acoustic Nadine was every bit as compelling as its electric counterpart, and nights like this one offer a hint that Lit Up from the Inside might well cross over from the alt-country ghetto.
But reality was pretty tweaked that night, when the most hyped-up audience member I could see was a skinny-ass hippie with a ponytail and goatee. Five years between Elastica records will do that to you, I guess. He was pogoing his bony butt off, and the feeling was mutual. It was the first show I've seen in a long time where the short running-time left me hanging in a good way. So, in tribute to the evening's hit-and-run spirit, some impressions:
Songs from the new one, The Menace, which replace the first one's genius whoreishness with Velvety drone and the year's best dog-bark chorus, got even weirder and noisier. Especially the one with the laundry list of "What I want," which gives it up to the goth girl in all of us. Or the Elastica theme song, almost as cool as the scene in Bring It On in which one cheerleader barfs on another. And then there's "Your Arse?My Place"?does that line actually go "Blondie...was black"? Joking about the "da da da" Volkswagen commercial, and then reclaiming the fuck out of it. Then, even newer songs, speedier and punkier, one of them called "The Bitch Don't Work" or something. Cover of "Psycho Killer" with Justine doing a little bump and grind on the "fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa," and then, I swear to God, an "oy-oy-oy veh."
"Connection," reminding me that I know all the words and that I can sing along without looking like a dork and getting a beer thrown at me... New keyboardist Mew playing Gabrielle to Justine's Xena, relishing every chance to slip away from the demented piano crescendos and rub booties. The rapped mantra, "Play the pain away. Fuck the pain away." How do they get all those rinky-dink keyboard noises to sound so menacing? The cute drummerboy sending a clear message to Dave Grohl to quit playing pop star and get back where he belongs. Annie the bassist looking more and more like Joan Jett than Joan Jett does. A promise from Justine that we won't have to wait another five years. Parker Posey standing near me for a few seconds (she makes that same face in real life!) before disappearing up into the balcony. The balcony...
Justin Hartung