Show review: The Wedding Present at Brighton Music Hall – 3/23
Another trek out to Allston last night to catch jangly British post-punk band The Wedding Present on their post-SXSW US tour. Toquiwa and The Jet Age opened.
Hailing all the way from Tokyo, all-female guitar pop band Toquiwa offered up an impressive amount of energy and stage presence for what was, at this point in the evening, a largely empty venue. ‘Cute’ seems to be the primary word used to describe this band, and five minutes into their set it becomes pretty clear why. Their music is upbeat and catchy, and vocalist Asuja runs back and forth across the stage with a constant smile, imploring various audience members to dance, clap and sing along. Their set would no doubt have been more enjoyable with a larger crowd, but their dedication to engaging myself and the other twenty to thirty early arrivals was admirable. Toquiwa initially felt like an odd fit as an opener, but they won me over soon enough. Their energy was infectious and the group was simply too endearing to dislike, regardless of the context.
Washington, D.C. indie rockers The Jet Age were on next. They may have lacked Toquiwa’s stage presence, but made up for it with a set of impressive guitar-driven songs. The no-nonsense guitar/bass/drums lineup sounded tight and focused throughout their forty minute set. Frontman Eric Tischler sang lead vocals which were largely buried in the mix (a recurring issue at Brighton Music Hall), but seemed content to let his guitar do most of the talking anyway. His fiery, J Mascis-esque solos were both technically impressive and skillfully employed. Instrumental workouts can get boring when the rest of the song feels like an excuse to move as quickly as possible from one to the other, but this band has strong enough tunes to back them up.
The Wedding Present took the stage at 10:30, launching into a song from their new LP Valentina immediately following a tongue-in-cheek countdown which played over the house speakers. Interestingly, the band is not currently out to tour songs from their latest album. The big draw last night was a front-to-back performance of the 1991, Steve Albini-produced Seamonsters. Pitchfork made a quip this week in their review of Valentina about this tour indicating the band’s ‘lack of confidence’ in the new songs, but judging by last night’s performance, there was certainly no reason to feel that way. The new songs felt right at home when juxtaposed with Seamonsters and other older material.
Bands are often maligned as ‘nostalgia acts’ for performing whole albums in concert, but it would be wholly unfair to reduce this show to that. Seamonsters sounded fresh and urgent as ever last night. Guitarist/singer/songwriter David Gedge conveyed the emotion of these songs as if he wrote them yesterday rather than upwards of twenty years ago. Gedge is the band’s only constant member, and the current lineup of Graeme Ramsay (guitar), Pepe le Moko (bass) and Charles Layton (drums) has only existed for a few years. The constantly evolving cast of musicians is something like a Fall situation, but I can’t imagine Gedge being half as difficult to work with as the infamously cantankerous Mark E. Smith. Regardless, if I’d gone into this show not knowing any of that, I would’ve easily believed that these four had been performing together for much longer than they have. The band was on-point with both old and new songs, nailing perfectly the dynamics shifts which are especially key on several Seamonsters tracks. They also held things together nicely during the several instances where Gedge’s rapid-fire strumming snapped strings and necessitated switching guitars mid-song.
At the close of ‘Octopussy,’ the record’s last song, Gedge thanked us for being so receptive to Seamonsters. “It’s intense,” he laughed. He’s right about that, but the record’s intensity certainly doesn’t make it inaccessible. The crowd was happy to revel in the noisy catharsis of these songs, and seeing Gedge so engaged in performing them made me appreciate them all the more. It’s the mark of a great songwriter when, twenty one years on, both he and the audience can still connect with the songs in the way we all did last night.
