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Moon Tooth: Live Review at St. Vitus

Prompt: Attend a live show, and submit a review with a short turnaround

I’m going to–right now–claim Moon Tooth for my own. I’ve grown up on Long Island in the Brand New/Taking Back Sunday wake, and have spent years shuffling past people who claim how dead the local scene is–contending with those who contribute nothing but acrimony and expect a phoenix from the ash. Despite our sins, the gods are kind and have gifted us Moon Tooth, which, if we were to be terse, is a “prog” metal band. I’m keeping big quotations on the word “prog” here, because the band nimbly weaves through an arsenal of influences, fusing elements of sludge, math rock, blues, and thrash. It’s a bridled chaos that is only amplified during their floor-crushing live performances. Their show at Brooklyn metal den St. Vitus, where they opened for Intronaut and Entheos this past Sunday night, was no exception.

So, how does one describe Moon Tooth? The band is a firestorm, hailing holy hell onto a wickedly delighted audience. Opening with the teeth-gnashing “Queen Wolf,” singer John Carbone, who sings with a celestial deftness, is not at all what I expected to see on stage. His body juxtaposes his voice with a clomping wildness, set haphazardly to the beat that the other two standing band members soon adopt. The MoonToothPosterrest of the set continues with a similar feral barbarity punctuated by a surprisingly spry guitarist Nick Lee jumping from stage to half stack and back, and Carbone leaping into the loving embrace of a germinating pit–neither make a misstep.

As a metal band, Moon Tooth is distinctive in that they possess all the crunch and sludge of bands like Mastodon while at the same time occupying the vocal finesse of artists like Mutemath. But perhaps what’s most attractive about seeing the band live is observing the line they walk. Moon Tooth is serious: they’re throwing down seriously heavy riffs with eloquent lyricism. But despite their unquestionable sincerity, they’re incredibly fun to watch, and the band embraces a certain self awareness–a disregard of playing close to chest in an effort to gain a godlike aloofness. Moon Tooth is wholly mortal, a fact evidenced when Carbone throws his bloody beating heart into the ring in earnest with every manic dance-spasm, and Lee makes no moves to veil his delight in the visceral gut-punches coming out of his snarling guitar. Though I’d currently peg them as a group in the developing stages of navigating stage showmanship, the audience buy-in is sure to come. In the meantime, I’m just as pleased to watch the clumsy, pounding spontaneity that punctuates their non-stop set.

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St. Vincent of Strange Mercy, Pray for Us Women

Prompt: Connect a musical moment with a larger cultural narrative

The stage was engulfed in a thick white fog, and aside from the anxious whispers of an expectant audience, the entire room was filled with a pulsating drone–slightly mechanical in sound–impossible not to fixate on. It’s March of 2015 and I’ve driven three and a half hours to stand in the newly re-named Upstate Concert Hall, about three people deep from the platform’s ledge (a spot I pushed and ducked my way into during the previous 30 minute art-pop set). Suddenly, the droning stops, and the silhouette of Annie Clark emerges from the mist. Her face is wreathed with untamed brown locks that reflect the wildness in her eyes. Clad in a black sheath dress emblazoned with a single sequined eye, Clark is flanked by the talented Toko Yasuda who acts as second guitarist, keyboardist, or back-up singer, depending on the musical demands. Toko also wears a dark shirt with sequining–however in her case the eye is swapped out for a set of red lips. The symbolism is fitting: the eye represents the imagination of the mystical visionary and the mouth stands for the organ through which those conceptions are transformed into sound.

Clark pounces on the abrupt silence left by the absent droning and, without warning, throws the band into the set. “Bring Me Your Loves” starts with St. Vincent simultaneously speak-singing the command of the track’s title and stretching out her arm, palm opened wide, with the uninhibited confidence of a three-year old demanding–rather than asking–for more, before returning her hands to the guitar and shredding the riffs of a woman who has not known earth as long as she has known the cosmos. Like all of her music, “Bring Me Your Loves” flirts with an otherworldly knowingness, and the song is a near perfect example of explosive chaos and calculated restraint–a raw display of musical talent made even more striking because of the masterful way in which St. Vincent commanded the stage in this live performance.

St_Vincent_artwork St. Vincent, a name that both acts as the alter-ego of Annie Clark and the name of the group that she performs in, has finally crossed into mainstream–even if it has grudgingly done so. The eponymously titled album released in 2014 saw a Grammy win in 2015 for “Best Alternative Album,” and peaked just shy of a top ten spot on the Billboard charts. Clark is not only significant because of her incredibly virtuosic melody writing, guitar playing and musical arranging. She has consistently occupied a public social space that is decidedly feminine without being overtly sexualized. She is, of course, a woman, but she has freed herself–at least partly–from needlessly gendered behaviors in a way that feels notably sincere. Her recent launch of an Ernie Ball “Music Man” signature guitar–a guitar designed for women’s bodies that resists pandering by using either the color pink, animal-skin prints or heart symbols–is an excellent example. Instead, she lives outside the sphere of sexual stereotypes every time she takes to a stage dive and at those manic moments when she wildly pulls the strings off her guitar in the middle of a solo. Likely because of this, there is a subtle but powerful shift starting to emerge as opinion moves from “Annie Clark is an excellent female guitarist” to “Annie Clark is an excellent guitarist.”

Perhaps it is for these reasons the live performance of “Bring Me Your Loves” was so striking. Clark is a musician who stimulates the innocent request, “Please sir, I want some more,” that females have learned to suppress as they grow older. As the world continues to deny women basic liberties, the command to bend under the totality of the normative model is transformed over time to a dance of “maybe”s, “could I”s, and “if that’s OK with everyone”s. Clark dares to force her audience to engage with the music beyond a sonic level. With an extended palm, St. Vincent is aiding in the effort not only to carve a place out for female musicians in 2016, but also to give serious credibility yet again to the threadbare argument that women have the right to be taken seriously.

 

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Bergo ’45–Dresden

Is Rock dead?

Just posing the question makes me twitch and I’m starting to break out in sweats thinking about it. At the same time though, artists who seem to genuflect to the “Gods of Rock” end up falling into tired tropes, and it’s natural to consider how many times an idea can be recapitulated and still be revolutionary. Bergo ’45, like many rock groups, is a band that owes a debt to the mainstream music of the late 60’s and 70’s however, its 14-track span feels aimless in scope and fails to either honor the bands or advance the genre.

Their first LP, the ambitiously titled Dresden, falls flat of its lofty name and though there are certain moments in their sound worth exploring, the work is largely a hallmark of a band yet to settle into a coherent approach. The firebombed Dresden image that haunts the album’s cover seems to prime the listener for something vaguely political—perhaps offering an exploration into the atrocities of war, or a meditation on dehumanization—but if there’s a loaded message to be taken from the album, it must be buried somewhere in the unintelligible vocals. CaptureThe album suffers from severe production issues, often dragging the vocal line to the bottom of the mix, where it is gleefully swallowed up by needless, hefty instrumentals. “Mud in Your Eye,” the album’s opening track, is a good example of this defect with vocals that mimic someone in the final throes of treading water—bobbing up and down, dangerously close to being drowned entirely. The lo-fi quality of the recording could work if the band wallowed in the DIY aesthetic and possessed the defiant snub of high fidelity in the vein of bands like The Vaselines. But the music seems to be too calculated to exist in that space.

Aside from the recording quality, the band suffers from self-congratulatory instrumental sections and frivolous fills that move the music nowhere and that could be cut entirely without consequence. “Wasted Words,” a track clocking in at 10 minutes, could be more aptly titled “Wasted Time” as the two minutes of halfway-decent songwriting is regurgitated ad nauseam. It’s as if the band members need the listener to know how proficient they are on their instruments. Though mindless soloing may be impressive at parties, it is positively grating in the context of an album. The drummer is the most grievous offender, offering completely superfluous fills (in “Mud in Your Eye,” “Sweet Mary”), and, in the case of “It’s Just About Time,” creating winded solos that flirt dangerously with falling behind the beat.

The band’s strongest songs, not surprisingly, are its simplest. “Poignant” and “Fifty-Eight,” slower tracks propelled by solid acoustic strumming, seem to hit their intended mark. Without the weight of the other instruments the vocalist drops his falsetto, and instead adopts a lower register, which sounds far less forced than many of the full-band tracks. “And So It Goes” and “Run It,” though imperfect in arrangement, point toward what could be the sound of a band matured. The tracks—which have an almost Smiths, new-wave vibe—instead of fighting against the singer’s vocal range, not only work with his voice but also feature the few moments when the band exhibits a cohesive sound without any hint of competitiveness. In “Run It” especially, the vocalist is almost unbridled in his rawness, and it is one of the few flashes of sincerity that we hear on the album.
Dresden is the sound of a band that might have potential but fails to fully brandish it here. At its best, the album is inconsistent. There are four or five interesting moments, but they lack development (or worse, suffer from a tedious overdevelopment that beats songs within an inch of their lives), and though I have a hunch that Bergo ’45 produces something dynamic and unique in a live setting, it doesn’t translate on the recording, which is often wearily flat sounding. Dresden fails beyond the sum of its dysfunctional parts—it neglects to create anything meaningful, and seconds of musical daring are quickly substituted for fatigued safe-sounding riffs. Rock may not yet be dead, but rest assured that Bergo ’45 is not doing it any favors.