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I’ve seen a lot of bands in my time, and the incident rate of a broken guitar string, while not unheard of, is relatively low. I guess I haven’t seen enough of DAVID GEDGE‘s playing, as he went through at least two if not three strings during THE WEDDING PRESENT‘s performance recently in Cambridge. Such are the hazards that Dave’s Epiphone faces in the wake of his buzzsaw playing style. Back in the 90’s I recall the band selling pins that proclaimed ‘All The Songs Sound The Same,’ a self-initiated jab at their perceived limitations. It wouldn’t take the band long to shed these shackles, and by the time their second record Bizarro hit the stores, the frenetic tempos and headlong vocal rush still ran strong, but subtle shifts had occurred.
At this point, the ‘let’s the play the entire LP’ schtick is coming dangerously close to wearing out its welcome, but I still think it’s a band-by-band basis to whether it works or not. The Wedding Present certainly gets no flak from me for choosing their second album to play through, but before they launched into the frenzied chords of “Brassneck,” they played what appeared to be brand-new songs, including the great ‘i Wake Up Screaming’ about infidelity and “Deer Caught In Headlights,” prefacing these songs by saying that we didn’t know them now but we’d be clamoring for them in a few years. However, the main reason that people were there (including a contingent from Rugby, England, who’d seen the previous three shows in DC, Hoboken and NYC) was for 1989’s Bizarro, and the main course did not disappoint. A slight question going in was whether or Gedge and company would serve up the original UK edition, or the augmented American version, which aside from having two versions of “Brassneck” featured some b sides from the original singles, one of which being Pavement’s “Box Elder.” That’s fairly remarkable since at the time Pavement had just released their debut Slay Tracks 7” EP, but the band had managed to land their hands on a copy and been smitten. Alas, no Malkmus-penned songs tonight, only Gedge originals and that was the right decision to make I think, staying true to the band’s original intent for the record.
As they made their way through the boundless energy of strumfests like “Kennedy” and the epic “Take Me!” I considered a parallel that never dawned on me before but was probably obvious to others, and that is the sonic similarities to THE FEELIES and latter-day UNREST, both bands taking that mainline jangle to the asymptotic end. I imagine that some lazy hummingbirds beat their wings fewer times per second than the rate that Gedge’s plectrum attacks the strings. “Be Honest” was a perfect closer, a bit of calm after the six string storm.
GIRL IN A COMA played a pretty fun set of garage-y songs that fit somewhere between the spectrum of THE BLACKHEARTS and mid-90s Riot Grrl material, and it wasn’t a big surprise to later learn that they are on JOAN JETT‘s record label. Bands can go through the motions but it’s hard to fake sweat, and by the end of it singer/guitarist NINA DIAZ was fairly glowing, the ending strains of their triumphant closer “Ven Cerca” (a cover of a song from LOS SPITFIRES) echoing to the back of the long, narrow room. THE MOTION SICK pulled warm-up duties, with mustachioed leader MICHAEL EPSTEIN leading the band through a smart hybrid of hooky songs filtered through a late 80’s post-punk/new wave lens, mostly via the guitar tone of PATRICK MUSSARI. Epstein’s vocals sway a little too far into CONOR OBERST territory for me, and the dance move song didn’t work but a song like “Jean-Paul” certainly hit the right buttons.
click for more photos of The Wedding Present, Girl In A Coma and The Motion Sick
