Display

w/ Hint Hint, Automaton

Sat Feb 8, the Vera Project, 7:30 pm. Jan 27 show canceled.

I'm about to pack it up and hit the road for some place less consumed with the notoriety of performance and the "business" of music-making; where I can find cerebral rock music without all the professional aspirations--a fabled land where rebellious innocence and artful defiance mean more than the promise of a fat label advance. I'm going home. I'm going back to... Everett.

From out of Kimberly-Clark's sprawling paper mill cloud comes Display, a band that's beginning to make Snohomish County look pretty damn inviting.

Take the Lester Bangs school of punk rock as academic pursuit, filter through a wall of archaic effects pedals with enough blinking lights to make even the most stoic gearhead swoon in disbelief, and you have something of a vague framework for the Display "sound." And although clouded in the obtuse sonic affectations only a religious devotion to the Kraut/post-punk altar could yield, Display somehow transcends the shrewd tedium of most aural academia, making a racket that's as volatile as it is calculated.

The singular beauty of Display, or rather, one of the many beauties, is that in a city where even the most mediocre pop bands somehow see a need for a booking agent, a band as smart and invigorating as Display maintains such an absence of pretense. A modest, fervently autonomous three-piece (consisting of guitarist/vocalist Jeremy Cooper, bassist/vocalist Jim Paschall, and drummer "Dancey" Moore), the band has spent the last few months accumulating the means for a reasonably humble recording studio with which to record their debut, scheduled for self-release sometime later this year. For the time being, however, performance stands as their selling point--and Display's ardently demure delivery is powerhouse, yet deceptively inviting. There's no posture; only subversion presented as seemingly naive passivity. An art rock band that's as sincere as it is challenging-- what are the odds? All signs point to Everett.