White Hills played Great Scott – 5/11
Sunday was one of the first legitimately beautiful days of the obnoxious faux-spring that has cloaked Boston in grey misery for much of the last month or two, and a gorgeous day faded into a warm, weird night in Allston where NYC heavy pysch space-rockers White Hills were set to wrap up a tour at our beloved Great Scott.
The evening subverted the typical 3+ band GS experience by slotting White Hills and White Hills alone on the bill, leaving me to listen to the drunken ramblings of a man in a Bob Marley shirt outside in lieu of a proper opening act. He earned points for originality in his accosting of random concert attendees and passersby, if nothing else (a dude in a leather jacket earned the nickname “greased lightning”; I only got “little bitch”). He would later insist that he was “usually a very nice person.” I left Marley Man to his own devices as the band’s 10:15 set time approached, which was probably for the best.
If you’re anything like me and happened to spend your Saturday night seeing Jim Jarmusch’s eccentric vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive after Mogwai’s absurdly early House of Blues show, the last you saw of White Hills would’ve been the band’s cameo appearance in the film at a Detroit dive bar. If you are anything like me in another sense, you may also have seen them open for Kylesa last year at the Middle East. They were particularly impressive in the latter instance, arguably outshining the night’s somewhat listless headliners with a tight and inspired set. White Hills promise “fuzzed-out motorik space rock,” and that’s precisely what they deliver. Sunday night was no different.
Performing in front of the requisite psychedelic projections and a miniature wall of amps draped in white sheets, the band spent over an hour taking a small crowd on a strange sonic trip. They put the power trio format to good use with a muscular sound, balancing Dave W.’s guitar freakouts, Ego Sensation’s thundering bass lines and Nick Name’s gate-crashing drums in a perfect storm of propulsive rock ‘n’ roll. Individual songs spiraled outward and onward for extended periods of time, but in such hypnotic fashion that it was easy to lose track of exactly how much time that was. Vocals entered the mix from time to time, but took a Kevin Shields cue to largely bury them in the mix for texture. W.’s wah-pedal explorations ultimately felt like the band’s most direct form of communication, save for a brief “thanks” or two. Few breaks and fewer words left all the more space for the cosmic jams though, and no one in the room took issue with that. A heavy, spacey and thoroughly awesome set.
