Clamb Comes Alive

Clamb

On 26 August, 2022 the Midway Cafe hosted Clamb, Boston’s own earthmagik peacelords, for a night of mind-bottling krautjazz. City of Four and Lon opened with a pair of proggy, fusion-forward sets.

Lon

Lon is a 5-piece, including a saxophone, guitar, keys, bass and drums. The band opened the set with jazz custom-tailored for barrelling down a highway at reckless speeds. Shades of Herbie Hancock-meets-Chick Corea on mood enhancers.

A patron by the bar remarked that a few jams sounded like the soundtrack to “Rainbow Road” in Mario Kart. He was exactly right. There were also a few No Man’s Sky riffs. 

If you watched closely, the saxophonist in Lon subbed out his horn for a guitar with an obscene number of strings. A bassist later in the night was rocking a 5-string. Enough is never enough, especially for the prog-rock scene.

City of Four

City of Four is a 4-piece. We’d feel cheated if it wasn’t. The band eschewed the Mario Kart vibes for a more Law & Order mood. There was some insane keyboard action – stacks of vintage keyboards seem to be another point of pride in the prog-rock scene.

Headliners Clamb is a 4-piece with the personality of your favorite broken-in armchair. It’s a band that knows exactly what it wants to sound like and just goes there. Their compositions stretch out for miles with muscular riffs and powerkeys vamping.

If highbrow rock n roll continued to evolve after the 1970s, rather than take detours into punk clubs and discotheques, we might have a lot more Clambs in our lives. For all the brainy scale surfing, though, there was plenty of grease in the wheels to keep the axe handlers honest. 

Extra points for playing through a stage-rush, mic-grab by an overserved fan without missing a beat.

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