And The Kids ended their short tour with Mother Falcon last Saturday night at Great Scott.
Right out of the gate, I wasn’t sure about these guys—anticipation does that, glittery stickers on faces and an incredibly involved soundcheck don’t help. The three girls are staggered, one behind the other, with guitar/lead vocals in front, keyboard/percussive vocals(?) next, drums/also vocals at the back.
The first song’s refrain of “we’re not pretty, we just have lots of ideas” set the irreverent tone immediately. Vocals found a comfortable point between Karen O and Florence Henderson (well, as comfortable as that can possibly be), from deep soulful belting to high-pitched “ayayay”s, and then to that sort of mock soulful belting you’d find on every other vocal line of Girls’s “Lust for Life.” I wouldn’t say the guitar was shredding, but there were some great riffs, many played while she was singing.
The synthesizer was the bass, but also doubled as a melody when the guitar was doing rhythm. But wait, there was also a xylophone, that was pretty fun! I guess that sums it up—this was just fun.
The drummer had a lot of personality, which is not something you can usually say about the drummer—sure, she let the front two girls have the spotlight, but she was tearing it up, contributing vocals while tearing it up (in a poppy, catchy sort of way).
It was Apple-commercial-indie-rock (or Apple-core. I’m coining that right now) that probably isn’t hiding anything deeper beneath the surface, but the surface is pretty goddamn great. There are hooks and sing-alongs. All the soundchecking paid off when it came to reverb, which was adjusted pretty precisely with the most minor hand gestures. While they’ve been playing together a while, this lineup is really new, but very tight. You get the sense that they were thrown into the fire on day one of the tour and are doing everything possible to not let that happen again. I’m inferring that from an off-handed line about how New York was not as receptive as us, although probably 90% of the musicians I’ve seen play in MA have said something to that effect.
Go see these guys.
Mother Falcon is an eighteen-piece band orchestral-rock band, 83.3% of whom were present on Saturday.
The best way I can describe them were if you were to give a college a capella band instruments. I had friends in college—I’ve been dragged to my share of vocal groups with punny names to know when I’m at one. The punny name, black dresses and dress shirts, traded-off vocal solos, Paranoid Android cover (which, saying nothing about the song itself, is forever is ingrained in my mind as “excuse me, I go to college. I listen to deep music now”) brought me right back to those classroom concerts.
A lot of the songs sounded similar and I don’t think this was so much “flow” as it was a very established sound with little variation, despite having rotating vocals. Much like a capella, it was more about the dynamics of each song to tell the apart, the peaks and troughs, the solos, the calls and responses. The last couple songs changed up the sound a bit, an old-sounding slow jazzy number and a country-ish waltz, but .
Easy, easy: the music was great—everyone involved is really talented, from vocals, to violins, cello, saxophones (ugh…i hate saxophones, but they were bearable), trumpets, keys, guitars—they did create the orchestral feel they were going for. And I’d rather have a cohesive sound than them just trying to emulate a bunch of styles all over the map.
For me, the band felt like spectacle with good music interspersed. But they absolutely know this: at one point, one of the multi-instrumentalists/vocalists got up on her chair in the front of the very-crowded-stage and started rocking the fuck out and I was more worrying she was going to eat shit (she didn’t) than getting up there to rock out myself, but this is one of many well-choreographed parts of the show. Mother Falcon is a band that I wouldn’t pick up the album for, but I want to see this stage show develop and you should too.