Cave and Wooden Shjips played at Great Scott in Allston last Tuesday and brought only a few very long songs to the stage. For each set a light show on stage aided in the moodiness, discount but if you’re one of those “I listen mostly to the lyrics” people, beware this concert.
For Cave (who are purely instrumental) each song was a very gradual evolution, sometimes repeating the same phrase several dozen times before moving onto the next song. It could feel like a broken record but it wasn’t bad: the evolutions were impressive. Guitar loops would build several simple riffs together to create the song, which is a fun thing to watch happen. The music could feel like something out of a japanese video game from twenty years ago, and then would bear resemblance to Emerson Lake & Palmer’s Tarkus Medley, would sound like the accompanying music of a generic indie pop hit, and then into one of Air’s more upbeat and sprawling compositions.
They were very technically impressive as well as diverse. Different songs would be in 3/4, 5/4, 7/4, 9/4, and good old 4/4 timing. There may have been others but I at one point I did want to relax and stop counting beats.
With all of this I felt like it was a show worth seeing, but I was left wondering if the repetitiveness of many of the songs (that occasionally threw me off but was there for the build) would be a turn off for most. At times I saw people glance around and check with each other that there wasn’t some sort of glitch in the Matrix and that this riff had actually been repeating for two and a half minutes with little-to-no change.
I listened to Wooden Shjips prior to seeing them. I knew they could be jammy and get into their own thing, so I felt prepared to see them live. I was not prepared.
The songs are built to be very repetitive. There is little or no change between verse and chorus, chorus and bridge. Vocals and guitars are the only things that occasionally stand out on most of their 5+ minute songs–I was hoping that these would bring the show to life, or that the entire band would bring an energy and sound that just couldn’t be captured on recordings. Unfortunately, they droned through their setlist for an hour. I’m pretty sure the band themselves can’t tell one song from another, and I definitely couldn’t.
The sound quality for both the guitar and vocals was unfortunate–for this, I don’t fault the band, everyone’s had those shows. It was just extra bad because the songs became much less dynamic than they already were.
I’d like to crown their bassist “most replacable musician I have ever seen.” But I watched him during every song and he was pretty much only hitting the tonic, the fourth, and the fifth notes. I thought my nadir of seeing uninspired bass playing was (confession time) a Blink-182 concert in high school, but I was wrong. This, of course, goes more to the songwriting–he wasn’t messing them up or something, he was hitting the notes, but that’s all. I’m sensitive about basslines–it’s an underappreciated instrument and some of my closest friends work at it to make sure their playing is thoughtful and varied. It shows in the song when this is the case.
The drummer wasn’t far behind. He also wasn’t playing poorly–he was just playing the songs the way they were written, not giving any extra energy that fans coming out to see them deserved. Even people who were trying to like it (I was too for a while) weren’t even swaying, let alone dancing. I haven’t been to many shows in my life where people just stood. It’s eerie.
Throughout the night, the audience wasn’t addressed at all. This was the day their album was released, but a word wasn’t spoken during the set except that apparently it was “Kiwi’s birthday, so this one’s for her.” And then they played another indistinguishable song.
The only thing Wooden Shjips’ live show would be good for is the beginning of a movie scene to establishing that we are to believe this is in fact a “rock club.” In my mind, it’s a romantic comedy starring Ryan Reynolds, because I really didn’t like the show I saw.