Amateur Eyes is a self-described “post punk indie rock group.” Take that to mean whatever you want, but first, give them a listen. They won’t disappoint. To me, they sound like the regretted love-child from a night when The Front Bottoms and Twenty-One Pilots got a little too drunk. I mean that in a good way, probably. Their lyrics are bare and bracing, as if someone dared John Pederson (their frontman) to tell the world the truth about himself and everyone else that he had hidden up his sleeve and he complied by ripping off that sleeve and whispering everything urgently into the nearest microphone.
Joining them will be Air is the Arche, shAAka, Dog Leg, and Fallow Land. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Air is the Arche before and I’m sure the other opening acts won’t disappoint. It’ll be a long and wonderful night of music.
When: Thursday, January 28th (tomorrow!). Doors open at 9:00pm.
The Michael Malis Trio performed on Friday evening at the Kerrytown Concert House.
The atmosphere was intimate and the audience was engaged and respectful throughout the entire performance. The talented musicians all seemed to know how to manipulate their instruments. Additionally, the musicians employed silence well and sometimes the silent moments were the most effective as well as most memorable moments.
Bassist Ben Rolston employed some experimental techniques such as plucking and artificial harmonics. Furthermore, drummer Stephen Boegehold performed well and seemed to master the technique of brush-playing. The talents of pianist Michael Malis, however, brightly shone throughout the performance. Moreover, the pianist sometimes performed alone rather than accompanied by Rolston and Boegehold. These moments seemed more intimate because the performance shifted from dialogue to monologue.
Additionally, Malis addressed the audience and provided them with some background information. For example, he said that poetry and literature inspire his compositions. This source of inspiration makes sense because jazz and poetry share several similarities. For example, both jazz and poetry have rules but also make room for improvisation.
Malis will perform again this month at The Raven’s Club. Click here to peruse his website!
The Michael Malis Trio will perform tomorrow evening at the Kerrytown Concert House!
The group will debut their newly-released album, Lifted from the No of Nothing. Mark Stryker of the Detroit Free Press recently labelled Malis’ music “sumptuous” and “impressive.” He continued to characterize the music as “loose and spontaneous, alert to dynamics and textural variety while balancing formal detail and discipline with freedom.”
The group consists of twenty-somethings Michael Malis, Ben Rolston, and Stephen Boegehold, all Southeastern Michiganders. Malis studied at the University of Michigan with internationally-known pianist and composer Geri Allen, Rolston attended Community High School, and Boegehold studied at Wayne State University.
The Landmarks getting ready. Photo Credit: The Landmarks
We got there early. Maybe earlier than we should–there were three opening acts, after all–but we didn’t know what kind of crowd to expect, and it couldn’t hurt. Neither of us had been to the Bling Pig before–so we had plenty to observe. For those of you who haven’t gone (and you really should sometime), it’s a dingy, ill-lit cramped space, the kind of place that I always take a minute to check out the emergency exits, but it’s got a lot of character. You can look around and get a sense of the history of the place, of the bands that have played, of the people who have danced , of the bodies that have crashed against one another, of the sweat shed, of the drinks spilled, of the voices that have sung, screamed, echoed and echoing. Ann Arbor’s a city full of places like these–places that tell a story that could only be told here–even as high-rise after high-rise goes up (across from the Blind Pig is one of these new high-rises) and chains encroach downtown, even then there remain these hidden flames of the city that still burn.
For the first two opening acts, my friend and I sat on stools to the side of the main floor. There were a handful of people standing in the center, but especially for the first act, The Landmarks, the crowd was still slim. Regardless, both bands grooved with what was there of the crowd, and there was never that moment when the crowd is too loud or too quiet, when the crowd is clearly uninterested or would prefer for that band not to be playing. No, even people like me, who were sitting on the sidelines gave the bands most of our attention. I preferred the more groovy sounds of the local band, The Landmarks, but the acoustic, softer tones of Air is the Arche were a refreshing break from the heavier, harder rocking beats of the night. Both bands are something to watch out for, and I look forward to them popping back up on my radar.
After Air is the Arche finished, my friend and I left the safety of our chairs to go in search of a bathroom. We wandered downstairs, through a maze of hallways, into the bar below, the Eightball Saloon, which was reminiscent of the inside of a dirty, vibrant carnival attraction. While there, I took the opportunity to read some of the many lines of wisdom, poetry, and advice that had been sharpied on the inside of the stall by various customers, for your reading pleasure. I was reading a rather crude observation out loud, “anal is good for your soul,” when a fellow patron loudly contradicted me–and well, I wasn’t going to disagree with her. After that bonding experience, my friend and I returned to the surface world to find our prime seating location stolen–but there was only one more opening act, so we decided to stand.
By the time the final opening act came on, Valley Hush, there was a crowd gathering in the center, bodies brewing and shifting to the front, to the middle. Some were like us, and merely seatless, but plenty were getting in position for the main act. Still, you could sense the crowd warming up, and some were even dancing to this band, to their fleeting melodies. I liked Valley Hush and their music, but I was impatient, I was ready for the band we’d been waiting for, and I felt like this last band’s set dragged on, we were so close, we were nearing the threshold–oh, I could hardly keep myself together, I couldn’t stand there much longer. I was ecstatic when they ended–sorry Valley Hush, you were great, really–and the crowd began to thicken, now was the time to cram yourself in, to sneak between as many bodies as you could, to find a place as close to the front as you could. Now was the time to rock.
And, nearly three hours after we had arrived at the Blind Pig, Flint Eastwood arrived on stage.
I thought I knew what to expect. I’d seen them before, about a year and a half ago–and I knew some things would be different, there was a new EP, they were no longer wearing bolo ties, but I thought I had reasonable expectations for this performance. They had only been the opening act then and not the main show, but things couldn’t be that different.
I was wrong.
Unfortunately, not a picture of last night. But you get the idea. Photo Credit: Flint Eastwood
Flint Eastwood started with the usual, “Ann Arbor, are you ready to rock?” shtick, which Jax asked us until she was satisfied with our answer, and then they came to life. They opened with the song “Oblivious,” and as soon as the music started, they were everywhere on stage–they were jumping, they were dancing, they were thrashing–they were exuberant with an energy that I cannot imagine possessing. There was only three of them–Jax, her guitarist, and her drummer–but they managed to stomp around the whole stage (except for the drummer, who still managed to thrash and bang on his drums as well as he could) and Jax was constantly on the edge of stage, right over us, right in our faces, banging her body to the beat. She was constantly moving her mic from stand to hand, strutting the stage, leaning out and over, pointing at members of the audience here and there, commanding them to sing a melody or clap their hands–and they listened, how could they not, they were enamored. When she ordered us to clap, we clapped. When she ordered us to sing, we sang. When she ordered us to dance, we danced. If she had ordered us to jump off a bridge, we would have. The band’s energy was infectious and we were pulsing, we were being pulled into Jax, as if she were the heart of a black hole. She too, was being pulled in, not to us, but to the music–there were parts where she was so caught up in it, caught up in her own dancing, that she would forget to sing. It wasn’t a problem, (nor probably even noticeable for most of the crowd), if anything it was beautiful to watch. For the bulk of the show, they played the rest of the songs from their latest EP, Small Victories, but near the end, they played “Can You Feel Me Now,” an in-your-face song if there ever was one. We were told to put our pistols up, so we did, and we rocked out to the song with our pistols, our hands, our arms, flying, thrashing, pounding the beat. After that, they announced that it was time to end and they would play only one more song: the title track from their EP, “Small Victories.” Before the song, Jax talked to us for a moment, and she told us if we were going through shit, she wasn’t going to tell us what to do or how to get over it, she couldn’t, but for the next few minutes we had to dance. So we did. During this “final” song, Jax jumped off stage and into the crowd, where she danced with us as her guitarist and drummer continued to rock, drenched in sweat, and then she climbed back on stage where the three of them collapsed. While they laid stretched out on the floor of the stage, they audience clapped and hollered and cheered, this rising, roaring, noise that never ended, no matter how long the trio refused to budge. Finally, after a matter of minutes, the band rose from the dead, claimed they needed just a rest, and played us one more song, another oldie, “Billy the Kid,” with the very fitting lyrics: this is the end.
After it ended, as we left that dark and dirty place, every member of the audience was handed this note, this little thank-you card. Because here’s the thing, this show didn’t happen at some 3,000 person venue. It happened at the Blind Pig and the attendance was in the low triple-digits. Currently, Flint Eastwood’s latest single,”Find What You’re Looking For,” has 7,684 views on Youtube. For a band like Flint Eastwood, every view, every member of the audience, every purchase of an album, every individual contribution–all of that matters. They know it, and as an attendee, you can feel it. They’re not a band that can take things for granted and their gratitude overflows their being, their presence. So please, next time you’re looking for something to do, skip the blockbuster or Netflix or Jimmy Johns, and maybe head downtown to the State Theater or Fleetwood Diner, but definitely stop by the Blind Pig sometime, even if it isn’t a band you know. Support the places that make Ann Arbor, well, Ann Arbor, and support the little guy–he’s got a long and difficult journey ahead of him, but with your help, I think he might make it.
This Thursday (Dec. 3rd) at the Blind Pig, Detroit-based indie-electronic-rock band, Flint Eastwood comes to Ann Arbor. Flint Eastwood is the project of Jax Anderson and has just released an EP titled Small Victories, which was written by Jax as she dealt with the death of her mother. They will be joined with Detroit-based Valley Hush and Air is the Arche, along with a local band, The Landmarks.
I had the pleasure of seeing Flint Eastwood about a year and a half ago. They were the first opening act for another band and I wasn’t going to the concert to see them. Before the show I had neither heard of them nor even bothered to look them up, but you can bet that after the concert, I listened to nothing but them for a week. I was amazed by their performance. For starters, they rocked. If you listen to one of their EPs, you might notice that their songs are on the upbeat electronic side of indie rock, but live, they absolutely kill it. There was an insane amount of energy present in them and even though I nor the rest of the audience had come to see them, they were able to get us pumped and ready to rock. It was a very unexpected, but welcome, surprise.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been listening to Small Victories on and off. On my first listen, I decided that their first EP was better and I should just stick with that, but something kept drawing me back to Small Victories over and over again. Although Late Nights In Bolo Ties (their first EP) has an in-your-face style that is impressive for an indie-pop band, Small Victories tells a story of overcoming grief and setbacks and all the shit life throws at you–and it leaves you with this feeling that life is worth conquering.
That was the first choral concert I’ve ever been to, apart from the combined choir/strings/band concerts at my high school. The first thing I noticed was that they all wore the same outfit, a full-length navy dress with gauzy sleeves. Irrelevant as this may seem, I appreciated this choice greatly. At any performance where there are no costumes, there is almost always a dress code. However, no matter how rigorously everyone follows this dress code, there is always a difference in the end outfit. In a choral performance, where the important entity is the choir as a whole and not the individual singers, the use of a uniform outfit was a very professional choice to make.
The second thing that struck me was how strong the sound was. I’ve really only heard my high school choir before, and while they were musically sound, due to sparseness of numbers and unbalanced parts (two boys to at least seven girls) they often sounded wispy. Which was why I was wondering how substantial the sound of the Women’s Glee Club would be without any male parts to balance out the low range. It turns out they just don’t need any male parts. I’m not surprised, because I know how good their ensemble is, but it was enlightening to realize that even the top vocal range can sound substantial without an equally low range underlying it. This was, of course, due to the fantastic work of the alto section. I only wish they’d been louder or more dramatic so I could have distinguished their parts more precisely; sometimes the sopranos were overpowering, but as I listened I realized that the alto section was providing a beautiful base for the music. Still, the fact that the sopranos were louder was, for the first time, something that didn’t bother me at all—they were wonderful. The concert programme was unique in that it provided the year and majors of all the girls: almost none of the sopranos are music majors, and yet they had such powerful voices. To me didn’t just sound like they’d been training their voices for years (which is probably true), they sounded like they could even have been professional operatic singers.
Midnight Blue, the eight-member a cappella group within the Women’s Glee Club, also performed at the concert. Their segment brought variety to the concert, adding more liveliness to the music as they incorporated popular songs to the performance, and also eliciting laughter from the audience as they performed their parody of “Jessie’s Girl.”
Both groups also added simple choreography to some of their songs. This was the one portion of the concert I had mixed feelings about: it wasn’t always consistent. Given the uniformity of all other aesthetic aspects of the performance (like the dresses), the fact that not everyone was moving their hands in the same way bothered me a little. Of course, this doesn’t mean they were off time—quite the contrary. It was only the preparation for the clap that was different: some girls brought their hands down in between claps while others didn’t, and so on. However, I did ask myself after the performance whether I would have preferred it had they omitted choreography entirely, and I decided that wasn’t what I wanted either. I think the inclusion of the choreography definitely added spice to the concert. One of the songs also had clapping that was deliberately uneven: for the first half of the song, only some of the singers were clapping, and others added in at the end. This is one place where the choreography really worked well, as it did for Midnight Blue’s portion of the concert.
My overall impression was that the singing was reminiscent of a chorus of angels. Since this was solely female voices, and since those are the vocals used in soundtracks whenever sublime experiences need musical accompaniment, that’s the image the concert evoked in my mind. It was beautiful to sit there and listen to their songs charm the audience, especially on a winter day as pristine and sparkling as Saturday was. It was a wonderful way to welcome the first snowfall of the year.
