Memoryhouse
"It's uh, different," said Memoryhouse guitarist Evan Abeele, introducing a new song late during the band's performance at the Bottleneck Thursday night.
Not quite.
For some, the hazzzzy headphone music of Memoryhouse will entrance listeners with its multiple evocations of memory and dizzying, glacial ruminations (as it did to much of the paltry crowd). However, for me, the band's repetitive sonic landscape formula wore thin, and there were moments where I honestly found myself bored.
That's not to say that Memoryhouse's music is bad. Even when the were boring, they were doing a lot of things right: setting mood and tone, for example. My problem is that I felt the mood and tone didn't develop further (like they do for a band like Beach House, which shares Memoryhouses love of simple drum samples and shimmering synths). The problem could also come from performing live what is essentially music built by -- and for -- computers.
The Years, released in February of this year, is an exquisite sleepy-eyed EP that highlights singer Denise Nouvion's charming vocals. With precise clarity, her voice provides contrast to the band's swirling ambient noise, making the band's musical endeavor of how-chill-can-you-go-before-it-all-falls-apart more effective. It's not that effective live, though. "Lately,"a choice cut from The Years -- which opens with the great line, Lately, I'm not sleeping / I'm not breathing / without machines -- was turned into a messy blur of indistinct hushed vocals and floating sounds.
Throughout the night, Nouvion's vocals ranged from great to sour, often within the same song. (I wouldn't have even noticed the flatness of her performance if it wasn't for the spurts of excellence.) Her off-key tuning was most evident on wordless vocals. Instead of chilling and throaty ooohooohs, the sounds she made was more that of uninvolved ohs. To be fair, the band's constant pleas for more whatever in their monitors and changing levels for every other song could have spooked the spirit of out Nouvion and Abeele. By the end, the duo seemed to be reaching for rote.
Effervescent music dissipates into the air. Not much lingered from Memoryhouse's set; instead, there was only a vacuum of twinkling sounds, released back in to the ether. The band's closer -- a stellar cover of Grizzly Bear's "Foreground" -- was a notable exception. Perhaps it was because the original has more concrete lyrics, or because it already works as a showcase for a vocalist; but, Memoryhouse's live rendition was much more like the band's recorded music, with strong declinations between Nouvion's vocals against the band's ambient churn.
That is the ultimate problem with Memoryhouse's performance: everything was in the background. There were no strong features or contours to shape the music. Instead, the band was caught up lassoing the air.
Critic's Bias: I lurves me some ambient.
Overheard in the crowd: "Their music is kinda glacial."
Random Notebook Dump: "Indie-as-fuck." I don't know where I was going with that; if that was a description of the crowd, or if that was even something I wrote about Memoryhouse. Also: "Robert Smith look-alike in the crowd."
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