Live Notes: The Movies, Eagle and Talon and The Lemurs live @ Spaceland (12.1.08)

Live Notes are quick and dirty observations scribbled upon the crinkled and crumpled mental napkins littering my brain at various local shows, notes that (hopefully) stand on their own enough to stand alone, without the hyperbolic adjectivery of a full concert review.

By Travis Woods

  • Openers The Lemurs deserved a more populated room or a later slot for their synth-slicked brand of rolling indie rock—and, yes, indie-rock is an amorphous and overused term, but crack open your dictionary to ‘indie’ and you’re likely to see a picture of The Lemurs next to the entry, in woodcut form—all wiry, nerve-bounced guitar lines hooked to epic choruses, self-conscious lyricism and mountains upon mountains of catchy hooks. Whether that simply makes them generic exemplars of the genre, or some of the best that it has to offer, depends on the set of ears listening. Mine were in the middle, attached to a bobbing head.

  • Can someone ask Bronson to come back every week as the DJ? Dream pop rarities and indie’d nuggets played just loud enough to be heard without requiring one to speak with a megaphone = DJ excellence.

  • Eagle and Talon were plagued with sound problems that dampened the raw, nearly carnal frenzy of their newest batch of songs (brief aside #1: their upcoming album, THRACIAN, has to be heard to be believed…an angry and wild-eyed LP, it’s the best collection of songs Elastica never thought to write while too busy copping Wire); I thought I heard Kim Talon say something about not getting a soundcheck, which may have been the crux of the problem, but that’s just it—I thought I heard, but couldn’t tell, as the tech issues kept the sound muddy and blurred together. I know CGT laid blame on the performance, but from the vantage point of Spaceland’s bar/table area, all I could tell was that “Georgia”’s coy, jazzy spirals justified it’s place as one of the new record’s standout tracks, and when the band was fleshed out with additional members, they quickly locked onto the LP’s jagged and immediate sound with a fittingly jagged intensity.

  • Brief aside #2: the tamale man returned. Bless you, mysterious stranger. Bless you.

  • The Movies’ first performance of their December residency was similar in spirit to, say, a box set by a lost and treasured band from out of time: the setlist was heavily comprised of older, more obscure tracks—leaving the diehards howling and the newbies grinning and nodding—peppered with the more accessible ‘hits’ everyone knew, like “Missed Opportunities” and “Rock in the Slingshot”—which left everyone howling.

  • Movies concerts can’t really be described, their shows are labeled experiences because that’s exactly what they require: one must experience the show to understand. Any kind of reportage comes back in euphoria-glinted slivers and tatters: sunglasses, Tim James in a frozen mid-air leap near the end of “Monumental Life,” rivers of booze, the shimmering haze of wordless beauty at the center of “Tired of Being Superstitious,” Jessica Cove doing those sinewy, snakelike moves behind her bass, and the only music of the postpunk revival that deserves it’s own resurgence movement and following.

  • Brief aside #3: the night’s best musical moment came from yet another technical glitch—immediately after the anthemic instrumental midpoint of “Missed Oppurtunites,” Brian Cleary’s keyboard cut out completely. After thirty seconds of his tense wire-wrangling as the band played on, the keys roared back to life in a pounding glory just as Tim James’ “WE WERE LIVIN’ IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY!” outro howls began. Glorious, and something you just had to experience.

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

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