Check out Edwina Hay’s shots from the night here
When I lived in DC, I was utterly bored by the local scene. It was more people who were chasing stuff which was popular within the indie mainstream or teenagers chasing after the 1980s Hardcore acting more as museum curators. There were certainly bright points here and there, but they were few and far between. So I cast my eye north, to Baltimore, whose combination of Bad Neighborhoods and Rad Warehouses helped hide a musical scene from view, until a handful of success stories turned the rock over, exposing a vibrant scene to all.
One of the most visible scenes within Baltimore is the Wham City contingency, with associated acts like Dan Deacon whose energy and boosterism has brought attention to a city beyond The Wire. It’s very easy to get lost here because every time you turn around, there are a handful of new bands trying new things just for the hell of it. It can get really weird, really quick.
Since I groove on that, I try to make certain to catch whatever act breaks free from Baltimore to tour, so I was excited to see Height With Friends and Nuclear Power Pants touring and hitting Death By Audio. I was even more excited to see one of my favorite local bands, ArpLine opening for them.
The Dreebs were the first act. It’s easy to say “experimental noise band” and just utterly dismiss what Jordan Bernstein and Adam Markiewicz are doing, but lazy. With violin and what they call “prepared guitar” (essentially an electric guitar set up on a stand horizontally like a steel guitar) they play discordant melodies that sound as though they come from an badly tuned radio picking up multiple stations. Using pizzicato and bow in equal amounts on both instruments, they pick at and draw objects along the strings to produce music that is at once familiar while also being alien enough to be oddly beautiful in its crystalline, melodic structure. While it sounds challenging, give it a shot. It’s challenging but not uninviting. Download America for free here.
After this, ArpLine was on stage. With five members playing eight instruments it was a little crowded. Live, ArpLine displays great skill as they bring the complex instrumentation of their self-released album Travel Book to life, setting the tone for the music by eschewing the house lights placing small red lamps by each member, bathing the stage in shadow and crimson.
Watching ArpLine perform live is like watching a conversation between friends, where the audience’s witness is nearly ancillary to the whole. The interplay of instrumentation as the guitars pick up and finish each other’s sentences, before both part to laugh at an inside joke, while the steady rhythm of the drummer propels the conversation forward with bassist, as the keyboardist flits between the two.
It isn’t until you see them live that the industrial tag makes sense. It’s Throbbing Gristle rather than KMFDM. Playing just a handful of songs, ArplIne concentrated on the uptempo aspect, “Fold Up Like a Piece of Paper,” “Weekend in the Colonies” (my favorite of their songs), “Amplify”, and closing with “Parts Unknown,” the vampy song that recalls late period Annie Lennox and Berlin Trilogy Bowie. They have a handful of dates in the next few weeks, including May 5th at Le Poisson Rouge with one of their favorite local bands Hooray for Earth. You can download ArpLine’s first album, Travel Book, for free from here.
Height with Friends performed as well. I wasn’t certain what to expect, whether it would just be rapper Height or if he’d have a contingency of his Friends alone with him. It was split. He had recruited a drummer and hype-man, who provided verse coverage, percussion and pressed play on the laptop. Height brought forth the energy that I’d seen before at Whartscape playing a handful of tunes off of his album Baltimore Highlands and a few songs I didn’t quite recognize. Possibly from the Druid Hill Lake, the new EP just released last month. You can get that free from here. The slow sloping rap has more in common with 1987 than 1992 or 2010, and as such is certainly worth a look to people who say things like “I like hip hop but hate rap.”
Headlining the night was art school rock act Nuclear Power Pants, a combination of spazzy pop music and visual art high jinks. It’s more performance art than concert, where the music seems it’s more an excuse to get people there to watch the performance than the be all end all final product. You have four members playing instruments in giant green monster head helmets and blue jumpsuits, you have a pair of girls providing backing harmony dressed identically, and gone is the pretense of the “conjoined twins” (perhaps the concept was lent to Amanda Palmer for her new act) and replaced by a lead singer who looks like a lounge singer Rasputin. The opposite of ArpLine, they bring additional lights and in addition to keyboards, one of the band members keys a complex series of lights. It’s really one of those acts which has to be seen rather than discussed.