When choosing what to show, many respected artists opt for the heart, like Elliot Smith or the likes of Angel Olsen and those who came before. They’ve lain out their souls into map-like songs showing exact feelings that we may adopt as our own for a couple minutes at a time. Listening is heavy even through falsetto voices, and, to quote the band this post is really about, “Doesn’t it just bring a tear to your eye?”
However, as reminded to us last week, bands like Ought take a different approach and hold different importance. Listening to Ought is like hearing frontman Tim Beeler’s train of consciousness, collected and fueled by the rest of his Montréal-made quartet. Happiness and trying to get that feeling are mentioned in the context of train rides and grocery trips, not breakups and get-back-togethers. The post-punk outfit prefers shouting the word “together” to describing a particular instance of it. Life lessons come not in metaphors but in head-on mantras of “everything’s gonna be okay,” and “I am no longer afraid to die, ’cause that is all I have left.” One live set makes this clear. Ought presents stuff from the headspace, not the heart, and that’s just as tear-inducing as any love song.
Last Wednesday, The Sinclair filled with the band’s tiny details and larger-than-life thoughts to the tune of crashing guitars and talk-singing. Through songs off last year’s Sun Coming Down and the year prior’s More Than Any Other Day, Beeler rolled his eyes back into his brain. Followed by a wag of the finger, it was like he repeatedly reported what he saw back there, music for thought, thought for music. Openers Priests and Ursula continued the theme with their own clear-worded testimonies to everything from “prom night” to visiting the doctor’s office.
It was a cluster of artists showing off the kind of songwriting we often take for granted: the less-than-painstaking, straight-out-of-mind kind. We came, we jumped and we heard every word, leaving us somewhat at a loss for our own thoughts. Regardless, here’s photo evidence.
