By Julia Reidy
I’ve come to really dig the homemade decorations bands have
taken to draping across their equipment for the sake of… what, beauty? Hipster
kitsch? Either way, it’s pretty charming. (I mean, have you ever seen These Are
Powers live?) For Portland,Ore.
doilies tied to their tables and tables of sampling boards and other electronic
gadgetry might be more geared toward aesthetic continuity, as many of their
press photos have to do with yarn and paper cut-out triangles.
But that’s not the point. The point is that Nurses treated
the Unicorn to a dynamic live show on Labor Day, replete with faithful
re-imaginings of songs from their August Dead Oceans debut, Apple’s Acre. They led with
“Technicolor,” the album’s first track, frontmen Aaron Chapman and John Bowers
bouncing the band’s characteristically nasal vocals off each other as they
twiddled their multitude of knobs and strummed guitar strings. But James
Mitchell, the band’s percussionist, played perhaps even more pivotal of a role,
providing the almost tribal beats that set the band apart (or group them into
the same sonic category as, say, Animal Collective), all mallet work, bass and
rim tapping.
When Seattle
Throw Me The Statue followed, the show became a very different beast. Instead
of three cutoff-sporting beardy fellows, TMTS had four fresh-faced people on
stage, led by the band’s brains Scott Reitherman. They spliced together songs
from their sophomore LP Creaturesque,
released in August via Secretly Canadian, and from their early 2008 debut Moonbeams. Just as Creaturesque was recorded with a full band instead of Reitherman
solo like Moonbeams, the group’s
sound has grown, too. Since the last time I saw them live, they’ve evolved to
play louder, faster, and with more energy, without forsaking the melodic skill,
glockenspiel (!) and drum machine vs. actual drums interplay that works so well
for them. Standouts from Moonbeams
like “Lolita” and “About To Walk” rose to the level of more raucous numbers
from Creaturesque like “Ancestors”
and “Hi-Fi Goon.”
Then New
Zealand
round out the evening as the poppiest group venue had seen that night. Sporting
every handheld percussion implement from finger cymbals and shakers to
triangles and wood blocks, Jonathan Bree and Heather Mansfield led the band in
the cutest set of songs to grace my ears in quite some time. They were on
point, bouncing keyboard, vocal and guitar parts off each other in some very
rhythmically complicated ways. They played at least a couple of songs off what
they called a “recently self-released EP,” and one that they bragged (not
un-ironically) was on a Starbucks CD. Like said retailer’s beverages, it was an
energetic and syrupy sweet way to end the evening.
