In a moment of trademark honesty on Wednesday night, Lou Barlow claimed to love touring in Minneapolis, because while the local weeklies in most cities have started ignoring him altogether, he can always count on a condescending write-up in the Minneapolis press. He must have been referring to City Pages, and though I didn’t catch what that unforgiving publication had to say about him this time around, he may have been on to something: the crowd at the 400 Bar was surprisingly light for his headlining gig with The Missingmen. But those in attendance seemed pleased, and there was a little something for everyone, the many sides of Lou on equal display: confessional acoustic strummer, sturdy bassist, leader of a smokin’ rock ‘n’ roll trio.
After a six-song solo acoustic set (including spare interpretations of Sebadoh favorites “Magnet’s Coil,” “Too Pure” and “Spoiled,” stripped to their most basic form, even more so than the lo-fi rendering that first brought the latter song into this world), he switched to electric guitar and brought out The Missingmen (Tom Watson and Raul Morales, occasional backing band for Mike Watt) for full-band electric renditions of songs pulled mostly from his 2009 solo record Goodnight Unknown. Barlow is no stranger to such an arrangement (for other instances of him and two dudes rockin’, see the catalogs of Sebadoh and Dinosaur Jr.), but as talented as Watson and Morales are, they struck me as a backing band by definition, and not as a trio of which Barlow is a member. They gave the songs a steady backbeat and a wider array of guitar textures, but conceded the spotlight to Barlow, prolific songsmith. Later on Barlow switched to bass, and then the trio took on more of the appearance of a true rock ‘n’ roll unit, each member locked in with the others, combining their energies into a perfect fury. To see Barlow lead the way with his heavy and nimble bass lines is to remember one reason why the reunited Dinosaur Jr. are such a holy force. Perhaps the essential Barlow is the one who’s always trying to get to the core of a relationship in his songs, but the Barlow most worth seeing in concert is the bass player who’s so hot he’s the leader of the band. Let us never forget his awesome musicianship on that instrument.
But romantic Barlow returned again for a solo encore, this time on a ukulele with guitar strings. “Soul & Fire” is a song made for such a moment, the 12:30 a.m. send-off from a dim bar into the dark of the night. The tune—composed of that beguiling sequence of chords that never fail to move, neither fast nor slow but suspended in time—is a great one, and I can’t even remember when and where I’ve heard it before, so it must just be a part of the human collective unconscious. Barlow provided a disclaimer before this farewell encore, that even his most miserable love songs contain a glimmer of hope. That’s true of “Soul & Fire,” and if it’s not in the words, then it’s in the transporting firelight flicker of the music.
Barlow had ample support earlier in the evening. Listening to opening act Young Man, one must ask the question: Is there a new crew of bands whose influences are located entirely within the 21st century? In fact, you could arrive at the sound of Young Man having only ever heard Vampire Weekend and Animal Collective, but those two bands are themselves such dense convergences of influences that this isn’t to say the formula for Young Man is by any means simple.
The quartet started life as the solo project of St. Paul native Colin Caulfield, whose YouTube covers of songs by Deerhunter and Animal Collective first caught the attention of the former band’s Bradford Cox. On the eve of his senior year at Loyola University in Chicago, he recorded a debut EP, recruited some of his classmates to start a band, and spent the summer opening for Lou Barlow and other high profile acts. That’s a considerable amount of success for a new band that, while still finding its voice, deserves it.
Caulfield sings in a high-pitched nasal voice, equal parts affecting and affected, and the band’s whip-quick changes in rhythm, awash atmospherics giving way to spiky energy, are proof of considerable talent. But the band’s songs are more interesting moment-to-moment than they are taken as a whole, and they have a ways to go before they’re writing tunes equal to their musicianship. They create some neat, shocking effects in miniature, but these are couched in laborious structures that seem too much defined by the peaks and lulls in the frantic, perhaps ADD-afflicted, drummer’s beat-keeping. That’s not a bad quality for a drummer to have, and it’s maybe one that Young Man’s Dylan Andrews has in common with George Hurley of Minutemen. But the early Minutemen broke up their ideas into quick jolts of energy, while Young Man arrange them in sequence within a single song, which sometimes collapse under their own weight. And yet, if they’re the buzz band of next Tuesday, I won’t be surprised, because I was sort of impressed.
They were followed by Wye Oak, a major American band, or soon to be one. If people talked about them more, it wouldn’t be necessary to say this, but alas, it is. In fact they are only a duo, but if you stood in the 400 Bar while they played and faced away from the stage, the enormity of their noise might convince you otherwise.
What can make a live show so important is not simply the opportunity to hear a song in a new environment, but the rare glimpse afforded into its making, the nuts and bolts of its production. It’s always been tempting to call Wye Oak shoegazers, and the term may yet be aesthetically accurate, but after seeing them live, it’s clear that such a label is philosophically, perhaps even morally, inapt. Because what Wye Oak achieve musically involves staggering amounts of hard work.
On one side of the stage, Andy Stack drums on a full kit with only his right hand and two feet. But awkward as he sways on his stool, threatening to topple off but always confident he won’t, he still finds a way to never miss a beat and play alternatingly sublime and crushing bass lines on a panel of synths with his left hand. Further to his left, singer/guitarist Jenn Wasner has it relatively easy, but she is eminently serious while she sings and shreds, and may look toward Stack or the audience but never shoeward. She claimed to be in a sappy, nostalgic mood that evening, given that the afternoon had brought the first hint of chill at the end of a long, hot summer, promising another autumn. But she delivered the old songs with the same dramatic force as ever, “For Prayer” and “That I Do” elevated by guitar blazes as finely wrought as literature, and “I Hope You Die,” on the strength of her beautiful voice, rendered as the knockout that it doesn’t quite manage to be on new stopgap EP My Neighbor/My Creator.
The band focused on songs from last year’s mighty The Knot, the new EP, and also previewed two new songs from the album they’ve been working on this summer in hometown Baltimore. Both of these, “Holy Holy” and “Hottest Day,” make fine use of their live setup, and if Stack and Wasner looked toward each other more often during these songs, I’d like to believe it’s because they were communing as only musicians can do, and not that they needed guidance as they navigated these still unfamiliar new tunes. I await the day they lay them out like jewels on a new LP.
