WERS, Emerson College’s awesome student-run radio station, celebrated its 65^th birthday last Friday at the Sinclair by having some great (and not) Boston bands, who’ve been on their station a bit, come out and play them a show.  They gave out free bladder canteens!

Bentshapesbentshapesbentshapes, I probably don’t need to gush about Bent Shapes on this website anymore.  I will a little, because it was a tight show and there were a few songs I hadn’t heard which were fantastic.  After seeing them like four times for free thanks to this blog (and Converse), I figured they deserved some of my hard-earned scrilla so I finally bought their 2013 debut record Feels Weird.

Just a fun, jangly performance, check them out.  I’ll leave it at that before I get all

Haha oh man The Field Effect. Sweet knit wool cap bro.

I’ve been doing this for like eight months now. I don’t have to be nice to everyone, right? I mean that’s part of reviewing.

The Field Effect is Butt Rock, plain and simple. It’s like if someone wrote songs in the style of Dave Grohl but then they sucked. I mean, there was talent—but no, I’m going to get through this without complimenting them because I have to be more assertive in my life.  They were super amused by the fact that they themselves were releasing a cassette single because who does that???

The performance was indulgent of that kind of wailing, early-2000s, Puddle of Mudd stuff. They had all the cues down, the guitarist taking off and then dangling his guitar into the amp for feedback, all-at-once slamming on the chord, just one jump off the drum kit? Ha, you wish, reader.

Parks just tied Bent Shapes for my new favorite local band. Watch out guys, in three or four more free shows, I’ll probably buy your album.

Parks is five people playing some of the tightest pop in Boston. Their vocals sound very They Might Be Giants/Jonathan Coulton-esque and the music errs on that side of pop while having some Ben Folds/Joe Jackson-y space-jazz breakdowns and brings it all home with self-aware classic rock riffs all played in unison and four-part harmonies. The songs each go through several changes which bring this sweet prog-rock feel. If there’s two things I’ve always felt should belong together, it’s Prog and Pop and these guys do it so well.  In fact, a friend of mine once said to me “They Might Be Giants are good, but they should do legit music instead of their jokey-lyric’d songs,” which is the stupidest thing I’d ever heard but in practice it works!

If that weren’t enough, they brought out Josh Kantor, the Red Sox organist, to play accordion on a song and it sounded great.

You should pay them to do it and make an album. They’re on a Pledge Music campaign, which idk what that is, but it looks like Kickstarter basically, so support these guys!

Air Traffic Controller was the headliner. Their intro was a bit strange. The between-bands-music went silent and then a slightly louder, eerie electronica build came on the speakers, with soundbytes of (oh shit) actual air traffic controllers. There were spliced video clips and computer generated graphics flashing on the screen behind the empty instruments.

So I’m old and out of it and I had no idea what these guys were like (yes, I signed up for this show because of Bent Shapes) so I’m like “oh sweet, this is going to be electro-pop or chillwave or some other mix of words Pitchfork coined.”

Air Traffic Controller is a folk-pop band.

Who knew? Well, the entire audience did. After the whole world-is-ending intro video/music (I wonder who had recorded that music for them?), they stepped out and played some Goddamn folk music. They did have some synthy stuff, but at its root this was folk.

I’m actually listening to their big hit “Hurry, Hurry” right now and you would seriously never guess what you were in for from this song. It sounds very Broken Bells-glitchy. I guess some of their stuff went that direction, but the majority of the set was acoustic guitar strumming and male/female duets. Test 1, 2 is probably a better representation of what you’ll get.

The bassist (the female half of the duets) had an incredible voice and she got to show it off a bit. She had a couple songs of her own, one of which featured Gregorian chants from the rest of the band while she strummed silently on the acoustic guitar. I wish I knew the name of it, but if you see them I’m sure they’ll continue to bring it out live because they killed it.

The more I skip around on Spotify, the more I’m realizing that they are in (or just got out of) sort of an identity crisis. Their first album The One is the folkier stuff. Probably what brought them together as a band. The newer one, Nordo, is the glitchier, untz-a-cah-tzuh dancey stuff that got them play and bridged them into the “indie” crowd. This concert utilized both and so I feel like if you keep following this band, you might get fewer and fewer folk swells as time goes on (not that Nordo doesn’t have some folk influence. But just some).