Tools
Longwave
w/the Raveonettes, the Turn-Ons
Stranger Personals
Sat April 12, Crocodile, 9 pm, $10.
I'll be the FIrst to admit that I really dig atmospheric guitar bands--shoegazer, space rock, dream-pop, whatever you wanna call 'em. Dunno why, but there's something about those monstrous walls of sound that totally does it for me. And I know more than a few of you are with me, having, as the Swervies might say, never lost that feeling. After all, this is a town where an all-Ride covers show can attract a whole roomful of shut-ins, and where every third band seems to have a nice little collection of delay pedals in its gig bag. Seattle's starting to look a bit like Oxford, England, circa 1990, minus the "really super smart people."
But let's face it. Shoegazing's got a hipness factor that ranks somewhere between math rock and the Alan Parsons Project. Its moderate resurgence here and elsewhere can't fully erase the genre-as-a-punch-line status it's carried for the past decade. And not entirely without reason. Aside from the innovators and heavyweights, your average shoegazer band relies on daisy-chained stomp boxes in lieu of actual songwriting and singing prowess. Plus, whether it's having to keep a watchful eye on all of those pedals, or being too blissed out from the music or the psychotropic drugs, band members are notorious for being more rooted to the spot than Stonehenge, often making the concert experience a visual snoozefest. And then there's the stereotype: crowds (and stages) full of sensitive, pasty indie geeks swooning over one minor chord drawn out for 23 minutes.
Which brings us to Longwave. They've been pegged as nü-gazers, and there's no question the New York City quartet taps into that aesthetic on their major-label debut, The Strangest Things. Much of it's built either on woozy, ethereal guitars and stately mid-tempo rhythms, or feedback freakouts and drum-smackin' frenzies.
But in many ways, the foursome--singer-guitarist Steve Schiltz, guitarist Shannon Ferguson, bassist Dave Marchese, and drummer Mike James--steer clear of most shoegazer dogma. For one thing, they've got fantastic anthemic songs focused as much on depth, melody, and structure as dynamics. Listening to the opener, "Wake Me When It's Over," might be the most infectious four minutes and five seconds you can spend at the moment, short of an elevator ride next to someone with SARS. Other songs prove Longwave aren't just a swirl-by-numbers outfit--they let cleaner-sounding six-strings jangle brightly ("Pool Song"), and wrap weepy violins around delicate acoustic strums ("Can't Feel a Thing") without getting corny. Vocally speaking, Schiltz's confident tenor and contemplative lyrics are never obscured by musical clouds. And, as he notes, the band isn't really prone to melodramatic meltdowns or pretentious posturing.
"Yeah, I don't ever feel like I need to go in the corner and 'have my moment,'" Schiltz laughs. "The shoegazer thing sometimes wears on us because we're not these dour, mopey guys. And musically we're pretty diverse, and we definitely try to make the live show pretty energetic, so us staring at the floor isn't quite the case."
Also not on the Longwave agenda: Overblown songs that take days to build to a furious denouement.
"Our goal was to make a concise rock record, one that people could get into really easily," says Schiltz. Ironic, then, that they'd choose to record with Dave Fridmann, best known for creating the lush and lauded symphonic pop of the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, and the Delgados. Fridmann's kinda the Ted Kaczynski of producers--his studio sits in the deep woods of upstate New York, and the bands he works with tend to blow up down the road. The latter Midas-touch element certainly played a part, but Longwave are such fans of the Lips' The Soft Bulletin that they jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with Fridmann. It turned out to be a pretty hands-off affair.
"Dave said he didn't want to radically alter anything or make our songs too dense, he just wanted us to be who we are," Schiltz recounts. "In the end I was a little worried that the label might make us change things--we were prepared to fight that battle--but they really loved the album. So if nothing happens with it, at least we won't feel like we got pushed around by anyone. We live and die by what we want to do."
I'd be willing to bet my Slowdive imports that they live.
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