By: Jon Behm
It was a slow night at the 400 Bar—one of those beautiful, cool nights when it feels almost sinful to be indoors at a show. Though it would have been nice to be outside working on my moontan, I made an exception because Califone was in town. After being exposed to them via their most recent album, Roots and Crowns, I have been looking forward to what was sure to be a good show.
Decibully by Jon Behm
The single opener of the evening was a little indie rock band called Decibully. By little, I mean six guys with about 20 instruments apiece. Though they may have been more at home on First Avenue’s stage—the tiny 400 Bar platform looked a little cramped—they made do with the space they had and had a pretty raucous good time.
Decibully hails from Milwaukee, and it is nice to see that city exporting something other than severe hangovers and gut rot. Their arsenal of instruments includes, among other things, a banjo, an accordion and a cowbell (though I doubt enough cowbell to cure a fever). They play complex, multi-layered progressive rock. While very guitar driven, if you listen closely you can hear Nicholas Sanborn’s skilled keyboard playing and Ryan Weber on the lap steel guitar coming through the mix, amongst various other sounds. Unfortunately though, you couldn’t always hear anything above the lead guitars. This could be the lack of stellar acoustics at the 400 Bar more than anything. While I love the 400 Bar for its close proximity of band and audience, its ceiling and walls sometimes bounce sound around like a pingpong ball.
Shortly after Decibully, Califone took the stage. The three members of the band looked like they had just woken from a deep slumber. They were ruffled, a bit slack jawed and appeared to be a little disoriented at first. They immediately launched themselves headfirst into the show by making a phone call to a friend of theirs via Skype, and listening to him make strange little computer noises live over the speakers. Rock on my friends.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a great deal of respect for Califone. I think that they are a terrific experimental post-rock band with a great deal of talent. However, the overall tone of the show on Thursday was somewhat muted. They didn’t even look like they enjoyed playing. When you can tell a band is getting into their set it makes a huge difference to help the audience really make a connection. I’m not looking for theatrics or cartwheels or anything, just some kind of acknowledgement that the music you are playing isn’t physically painful to you. Even when the band was improvising, which is where they really make complex beautiful music, they seemed mostly to just be working their distortion pedals out of habit. Don’t get me wrong, most of the time it still sounded great, I think I was just expecting something with a little more energy on the band’s part.
Califone by Jon Behm
I think my high expectations may have led me to not enjoy the show as much as I might have. Califone have been critically lauded for some time and lead singer Tim Rutili has worked with such talents as Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse. The band has a unique sound that is sort of a fusion of folk and post rock with some tribal elements thrown in. They also utilize some unusual found sounds. They experiment both with beautiful melody as well as harsh dissonance, though never straying so far into the latter that they are unpleasant to hear. Instead, the harshness occasionally provides a good contrast to the music’s more conventional elements—like Rutili’s haunting tenor voice. While there can be a certain wildness to the orchestra they create, it is firmly grounded enough in pop music so as to be a very accessible experimental band.
My expectations for this show were high—perhaps too high. While I didn’t necessarily feel cheated by the performance, I couldn’t help but feel that it could have been much better. The audience seemed to generally enjoy it though, so maybe I was the only one. I will allow for the possibility that on that night, I just had a tin ear.
Location Info:
400 Bar
Artist Info: Califone, Decibully
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