Mark Erdody, by middle aged dad standards, is living the dream.
His four sons are all crushing it on their respective Little League teams as they head into the postseason. His fifteen year old (who was finagled to babysit the other kids for the night with the promise of ice cream sundaes) became a slight viral hit when he and his band, The Memo, threw their demo onstage during Noel Gallagher’s show last month. Meanwhile, Mark has the night off to do what he was gifted to do before he was anyone’s dad: gutturally howl into a mic set below his waist, make his guitar squeal like a buzz saw, and open the night at Great Scott as the frontman of Kudgel.
The beauty of a show like Kudgel and Swirlies, who haven’t shared a bill in two decades, is that no amount of age, sporadic touring or parenthood could dull both bands’ penchant for raw, hair-raising noise. For the uninitiated, the two became staples of Boston’s underground in the early ’90s as bands like Mission of Burma and Pixies vacated such posts for more national recognition. Kudgel and Swirlies’ brand of lo-fi quickly became branded as “chimp rock” (at a time, of course, when lo-fi was a less friendly term), but both remain vastly separate, yet equally distinguishable in terms of presentation.
Kudgel, while bent over and howling like someone with a burst appendix, meet that perfect dichotomy of jocular yet passionate guitar rock. Yes, these are forty-something-year-old guys playing fiery songs named “15 Second Crush” and loudly joking whenever they can’t remember the chords to a song they wrote twenty years ago, but there’s equally no veneer in their passion for these songs either.
Swirlies, on the other hand, have ascended to a quieter, almost mythic notoriety in the last couple decades. Their entire catalog is often introduced as record collector fodder, but their debut LP Blonder Tongue Audio Baton is noted as a hidden gem of the shoegaze genre after standards like My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and Slowdive’s Souvlaki get exhausted. Despite such potentially elitist backing though, Swirlies is anything but excluding live.
Opening with field recordings of (what must have been) an incredibly irate session of couples counseling, the band walked on sheepishly smiling at one another before launching into “In Harmony New Found Freedom” with befitting, assaulting force. Playing mostly off of Blonder and their second LP, They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days in the Glittering World of the Salons, the band seemed to only want to add on to their most beloved songs via organs, pedal worship and a revolving door of members jumping on and off stage. Quietly expanding and contracting between three to six members every other song, Swirlies seemed more like a welcoming collective of audio enthusiasts than a regimented band on their first tour in two years. Holding up the boombox from which the woeful counseling was emanating, co-vocalist and founding member Damon Tutunjian offered a crowd member to “play the radio” during “Jeremy Parker”, eventually giving the job to a guy wearing a Swirlies shirt that easily predated most our staff here at Allston Pudding.
But, once again, the joy in this bill wasn’t some cheap nostalgia factor or capitalization on the fact that Boston is, once again, in a guitar band-celebrating renaissance. Watching Erdody find chaotic peace in his past and present lives or Tutunjian from Swirlies cheering on a crowd member that was simply screwing with radio knobs are the kind of stories that cement our city’s underrated greatness. Some may call these instances a sign of our inclusiveness, but the isolated, muffled world outside Great Scott after Swirlies’ ear-ringing set begged to differ. Like Erdody’s switch from “Dad” to howler on stage, I think the legacy and greatness in a show like Swirlies and Kudgel is its refusal to be just one static thing, instead exploring all the vast ways chimps can make pure noise something vital for decades on end.
For more photos from the show, check out our gallery below.
