Concert Review: The Weather Underground @ L.A. Cityzine’s Garden Party (8.30.08)

By Travis Woods

Let’s start at the ending and work our way back: it was the best night of music we’d heard in weeks.

Maybe months. A cat-in-heat wail that crisscrossed the ivy’d walls of plants surrounding us, latticed with an intricate acoustic churn so moving that some of us nearly giggled in disbelief at the sheer beauty of it all, as the Weather Underground essentially, quietly, announced their place as one of the most vital bands in Los Angeles, and they did so with a handful of unplugged ballads and deconstructed rockers that twisted with a ramshackle electricity that was as startling as it was hypnotic. Under a smog-starred night sky in a backyard in L.A., for a small, intimate gathering of friends, they played what will certainly become one of Web in Front’s Top Ten live sets of the year.

Filmed as part of L.A. Cityzine’s online Garden Party series, the set began with the meth-sped vascular throb of an overhead helicopter just as the band was to begin. “Los Angeles…,” smiled singer/guitarist Harley Prechtel-Cortez as he sat behind a miniature toy piano, “…it never fails.” The band then unfurled a new song, “Laughing Streetcar,” which lurched to a start with a wild oompah swagger—the song, part of a recent burst of songwriting, not only set the musical bar for the rest of the evening (setting it at a lung-crushingly high altitude, by the way), but signaled a new, fuller direction for the band, one in which they’ve fused the poetic, straightforward rock ‘n soul of their first two EPs to the wild genre explorations of their most recent release, A Bird in the Hand, creating an otherworldly sound that is at once familiar (Prechtel-Cortez: “This one would’ve made Tom Waits proud”) and unique. It sounded like a funhouse mirror’d version of Sun Studios rock crossbred with the strangely punkish swirl of a tar-slapped Waits vocal lost in a street carnival.

Prechtel-Cortez began hopping from instrument to instrument, utilizing a guitar, the toy piano, a banjo, and a harmonica as the songs demanded, while bassist Ryan Kirkpatrick deployed a massive upright bass to anchor the band’s rolling rhythm section. Beyond the emotional kinetics that sparked within the songs, a large part of the evening’s power was the band’s skilled arrangements—the acoustic takes on their electric originals were highly detailed, complex and, most of all, arresting, as the band swung from the belting, howled and accordian-led “Fight Song (For the Desalojos)” to a version of “Neal Cassidy” that, while unplugged, hurled itself forward like track-sparked freight train on the strength of the band’s acute interplay and Harley’s impassioned, throat-seared performance, one that left the audience, huddled together on a humongous blanket and surrounded by a cloud of smoke and cicada buzzing, wide-eyed and nodding. As the cameras continued filming and we continued staring in rapt attention, the band offered a nimble and rollicking cover of Love’s “Alone Again Or” before Prechtel-Cortez gave a solo encore of the band’s own “Leap Into the Void” before slipping into a medley of “Dear Prudence” and a giggling audience singalong of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” before collapsing (“What else can I play on just these two chords?!?”) with the opening verse of “Like a Rolling Stone” as the small, attentive audience cheered.

Local shows, even in the smallest of venues, rarely reach the level of intimacy (let alone beauty) attained that night by the Weather Underground—one can only hope to hear more live shows from them soon, as well as more of Cityzine’s Garden Party series. It was the best night of music we’d heard in weeks.

September 3, 2008 | Filed Under Concert Reviews, Exclusive Features 

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