Last Sunday night at Great Scott Orca Orca held a release show for their new 7” The Shallows.  The bill had four bands, tadalafil kind of a lot for Great Scott which usually has two to three bands per night.  I wasn’t sure if they’d be abbreviated sets because I live in the world of weekday work, salve but they were each allotted the standard local-band-45-minutes and used it all.

Despite it being Orca Orca’s party, ampoule they played third and Bent Shapes took the headlining spot.  I’m guessing this was a mixture of putting the bigger name on last and providing exposure to the up-and-comer at a time when people wouldn’t be petering out, but it’s definitely a counter-intuitive setup.

Caténine took the stage first.  Thing that struck me right off the bat was they were huge cure fans.  The clean flanged/phased guitar chugging along the Juno synth set up that sound nicely.  A lot of the songs would for the most part follow the course of a minor cure song, but then the bridge or prechorus would create a sort of non-diatonic major sound that was very uncharacteristic of the influence.

The playing was effortless and comfortable.  The frontmen were gazing at their shoes, but the music wasn’t a world away from shoegaze, so while it felt a little non-interactive, it certainly fit the style.  Keeping with the shoegaze comparison, vocals seemed to be less of a priority than the layering instruments.  They were there, but often times it would be two or three notes spanning half-step intervals.

ABADABAD (written in my notes as ABACAB because I guess I was just hoping for a Genesis cover band) was up next.

I want to say they were a parody band, but that type of thing is very fickle.  They were playing 50s doo-wop style songs.  Really well-written ones, but with the sounds of a modern rock band.  There were delayed and phased guitars, a wurlitzer with distortion, a super-compressed and fuzzed bass, giving almost a mid-2000s Flaming Lips vibe.  But still on that motown, diatonic and predictable chord progressions.  The parody comes in with the vocals, which were extremely exaggerated, overly crooning.  This brings to mind Christopher Owens of Girls and that’s not a bad comparison.

The song-structures expanded into some almost Isley Brothers 70s soul, but never much further forward in time than that.

Oh but at one point a saxophone came out and I hate saxophones.  There are exceptions, of course (horn sections with an alto sax are fine), but they brought in a cheesy, slow, sound to one of their first really slow songs of the night and it hit a point of “whether they’re aware or not, this is kind of hilariously bad.”

I think it turned out that the concept and sound and style was great.  The songs were maybe two-thirds hit, one-third miss.

Everyone was super talented.

There’s a line in an old Family Guy episode where the proper british baby says to a girl with a cockney accent something along the lines of “you don’t so much speak the language as you do chew it up and spit it out.”  This is Jimmy Hewitt of Orca Orca’s vocal style.  It’s that Northwestern accent except in the body of a Boston jangly pop trio’s frontman, the way Robin Pecknold sings the word “morning” (mwour-neeyun).  There, I’ve successfully insulted the vocals and compared them to a favorite artist of mine.  Next paragraph.

Yeah, I already used the word jangly, and too bad.  Because that’s the word I wrote and underlined to make sure to use.  It was jangly as shit.  Just poppy and dancy and bright.  At times it reminded me of turn-of-the-millenium pop-punk or the few Wavves songs I can stand.

It was never clear exactly what was new and what was old, except that the closing number would be appearing on the 7”.  The 7”, however, is four-tracks (which you can listen to on that bandcamp link up there).  I can’t remember which one it was, but they played a solid jittery pop set and ended it on a high note.  That 7″ is a highly recommended listen.

Bent Shapes were the main reason I attended this show.  I’ve been meaning to see them again since they were my favorite accidental encounter from last year.

Despite that, I was still thinking of ditching halfway through–by the time they got up it was getting kind of late and it was a Sunday night.  I was like “I’ll totally just stay until they play Big Machines,” which has been stuck in my head since the other time I saw them.  They played it second and then I remembered that I’m not dead and only kind of old and I stayed through and saw the whole show.  It was a ton of fun.

Bent shapes play poppy and rocky pop-rock.  Without checking, I think I probably described them as something you’d hear on an Apple commercial in my last Fall review.  I know I used that line twice and they would’ve fit the bill.  This lineup was a bit different than last time (I rememberd a third lead vocalist who wasn’t there on Sunday), but it was the same guitar-driven bouncy sound.  And “Brat Poison”: a song that’s main chord progression is the root and the augmented fourth, which if that doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s basically the rubbiest grossest two chords you can put next to each other.  And that’s the point.  It kind of makes you grind your teeth and the vocals are swooping and screeching, and yet it’s one of the only titles I remembered from the first show and I’ve had it stuck in my head since and I’ve listened to it on Spotify a bunch since, always with the warning to whoever’s around “this is not what Bent Shapes is like…but I gotta hear it.”

Oh, frontman Ben got married that day.  I guess it was kind of his party too.