The space Wild Flag creates is a tight summary of each of the four female members' perspectives on the unpredictable dynamics of post-punk. They nailed down the elated organ experimentation of Rebecca Cole (formerly of the Minders) with Brownstein and Weiss’ mad, dense hammers, letting Mary Timony (formerly of Helium) bleed her guitar through the cracks. The sharpened Timony tracks, like “Black Tiles,” tamed beastlier Brownstein numbers like “Future Crimes” and “Boom.” For a band suddenly rocketed to supergroup status by sheer existence, Wild Flag scores a remarkably clean hit live. The set — about every song on its Merge debut — was raw and tender. The group was accelerated, frantically pulling to escape the gravity of retrograde motions in contemporary rock.
Wild Flag had no introductions, no goodbyes, and an encore that was admittedly more like a practice (they stopped a new song halfway through because it wasn’t quite written). The heroines seem ecstatic about the formula, but rarely suggest their inflated status. The hubris dies with age.
Yellow Fever, on tour with Wild Flag, played a mesmerizing show. The Austin pair deftly looped a 16-bit synth over jungle drums and lazy, spidery riffs. To me, the neurotic jazz vocals recalled Fiona Apple, but the melodic angles conjured the Kinks — rigid riffs spilling over into scales mostly foreign to rock, and rhythm suggesting that oom-pah is proto-punk. Hear them out. They’ve got a point.Showing 1-2 of 2
They did play half of a Tom Petty song. The article refers to the song following, which was cut short as well.
Err, uh...that "new song" "stopped halfway through" was "Breakdown" by Tom Petty. But yes, the show was rockin'.
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