On Saturday night, the Cactus Club unfurled a five-band banner for a mini-festival organized by Ryan Matteson, whose popular blog Muzzle of Bees is largely responsible for keeping tabs on music related events in Madison and Milwaukee. None of the groups really had much in common, but that honestly feels like a good thing in hindsight.
St. Paul natives The Small Cities opened the show, waving the well-known flag of a four-piece, Neil Young-influenced rock band. The group seemed to garner the most sales throughout the evening, yet people were annoyingly distracted throughout their set.
Songs like “Trust Me I Am Not A Stalker” are some of the band’s best – slithery bass and guitar lines anchor the beginnings of a detached narrative. By using commonplace chord progressions and melodies, their love of delayed resolutions validates their sound. Getting acquainted with their album art, an abstract image of a water tower emptying its insides is an integral step to understanding their serrated aesthetic.
Using the moniker White Pines, Joseph Scott traveled all the way from Brooklyn to play a solo set; a break from playing with Cotton Jones. Atop unchallenging acoustic melodies, lines like “The forests are full of those dirty white angels” lingered like secondhand smoke. Scott wears an autumnal sadness on his sleeve, using it to project a search for home onto the listener. In “Wolves Will Shiver,” Scott explains that the tips of his fingers go numb as he tries to find shelter in the leaves of trees. To those familiar with his work, the records seem to preserve that homey comfort, making a purchase of his EP well worth it.
Strand of Oaks – aka Timothy Showalter – an Indiana Mennonite turned Pennsylvania Hebrew Day school teacher, is an acoustic artist on tour with Joseph (Scott). His voice is a cross between Sam Beam (Iron & Wine) and Jim James (My Morning Jacket), creating a timbre that was eerily familiar to audience members. To augment his magic, he preceded each song with a moving story, one of which included a harrowing image of smoke from a nuclear power plant hovering over a beloved forest. The absence of his backing band made for a heavy intimacy. One could hear a pin drop in the quieter moments of his set, namely “End in Flames” (from the recent EP Leaving Ruin) and a flawless Springsteen cover “Used Cars.”
Common Loon, a guitar/drums duo from Champaign, Illinois, is known for playing “pop songs about electromagnetism…and stuff.” To create their unique sound, the duo uses sampled keyboard harmonies that serve as preludes and exploratory backdrops. Numbers like “Palestine Everywhere” and “Dinosaur Vs. Early Man” are the best examples one can give of their short set, as each song proved more rhythmically complex and cerebral than the next. Following the multi-layered, lyrically-opaque introspection that dominated their set, their closer “Mexico” was a notable highlight. Its relentless melody was accented by a starry-eyed, half-baked sermon that Pharaoh Sanders would smile upon. Their new record, The Long Dream of Birds, is set to be released on April 6 via Hidden Agenda Records.
Milwaukee residents Conrad Plymouth followed the acid-fried sermon of Common Loon, sounding like a velvet pouch of disparate influences. While moving through the broken-chord, harmonium-colored melody of “I Will Remember Who My Friends Are,” the song left the listener wondering what neighborhood barbeque their influences met at back in 1983. The unspoken highlight of their set, “Taking Alcatraz,” sounded like a b-side from Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska but with a distinctly mid-90’s nostalgia, reminding everyone in the crowd that SEGA Genesis and suburbia will forever have a place in our hearts.
The Daredevil Christopher Wright: indie-pop from “three dudes from Eau Claire” is quite the anomaly. The group’s vocals are hauntingly offbeat; but, once one hears the songs unfold their three-part harmony sounds sweet, even in its most abrasive instances. Much like first-time listeners of Bob Dylan and Neil Young, you probably had to hate the voice before you discovered you couldn’t live without it. Through their deeply emotional style, they confront cancer, unfaithful friends and stewardesses with sensitivity.
