REVIEW BY IAN HRABE
I turn around to find Karl Blau sitting at the bar folding oragami. He looks absolutely insane. His hair is teased up into some kind of mullet mohawk with two pigtails coming out of the back. He's also extremely tall and wearing a Marty McFly vest, which makes the effect extra weird.
He also seems like the nicest guy ever, and though there was hardly anyone at the Jackpot, that didn't stop him from putting on anything less than an excellent performance.
Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk opened, and as their set tends to shapeshift from gig to gig, I was curious to see if they'd play up their pop elements (as the headliners are both bands are signed to the well-known indie-pop label K Records) or go in a completely different direction entirely. They chose the latter, and delivered 25 minutes of mostly ambient drone with a cover of Nirvana's "Something in the Way" somewhere in the middle. They incorporated a keyboard in place of a second guitar and a synthesizer, and for the first time the Animal Collective influence that has always been present with this band had practically vanished.
Olympia, Washington, sextet LAKE played a surprisingly short set of laid back tunes that were equal parts psych-pop and twee. After each song, band members switched instruments, which I always, always, think is kind of awesome. I initially thought this was a meritless trick, but tonight I realized the sonic diversity LAKE is able to achieve is partly a result from having someone go from keys to drums to bass in the span of three songs.
On one song, they'll have a Belle & Sebastian vibe, and by the next they've unleashed a killer groove with a sick bass line, three-part harmonies and spaced out synths all wrapped around sweet melodies (alternating between boy vocals and girl vocals from song to song). It was nice. They were nice, or at least seemed nice. There's really something to be said about a charming band, especially if they are as adept as LAKE and can be cute and charming all while making incredibly organized and sometimes complex pop songs.
LAKE also served as Karl Blau's backing band. Blau, too, played a surprisingly short set, consisting entirely of songs from his new album, Zebra, which is highly influenced by African music. For some reason, African music is a touchstone for indie bands as of late. It's like when, out of nowhere there are suddenly two movies about asteroids hitting the earth or two movies about magicians in theaters. Maybe it's a collective-unconscious thing, but recently Vampire Weekend, Dirty Projectors, and Animal Collective have all incorporated African rhythms and guitar techniques into their music.
Other than the drum rhythms and the guitar work, Zebra is mostly just another eclectic-as-hell Karl Blau record, although less accessible than his previous releases. Though he had all six members of LAKE backing him, the arrangements often seemed spare. Not in a bad way, necessarily, it was all just very ... out there. "Welcome in NW," for instance, starts off as a bluesy soul number before evolving into straight-up '60s psych-pop. "Dark Sedan," the evening's highlight, sounded the most like the Karl Blau I fell in love with on his 2006 release Beneath Waves. It's darker than the his previous work, but there's an excellent melody there, and the presence of a thick octave-running bass line, a dance beat and funky horns running through it all made it totally groovy yet still decidedly indie-pop.
Though at times there were more people on stage than there were in the audience, LAKE and Blau never seemed to mind and attempted to connect with as many people as they could. There wasn't a shred of pretense to be found and it made me really want to move to Washington because the Pacific Northwest music scene is pretty much my favorite scene in the whole US.
While shitgaze and dirty lo-fi garage rock are the genres du jour, it's nice to see that the Northwest scene is pretty much doing what the Northwest scene is always doing: putting out community-minded-yet-personal, pop-related music that is at the very least intriguing and more often than not pretty damn cool.
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