Keep The Faith

Grails never fails at Crystal Ballroom on Wednesday, 3 July 2024.

SOMA haribol their brains out in the opening slot.

Mark Erdody, a longtime local musician in the area, is going through a course of treatment and recovery from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Everything is expensive, especially medical bills. Help if you can.

Hare Krishna devotional music or just five guys from New Jersey taking a night off from the pizza parlor? It’s SOMA! The Sacred Order of Mystic Apogees, here to bring you to higher ground.

SOMA

It was an all-cross-legged set, percussion-driven, as the quintet led the crowd through New Age adventures of mantric repetition.

This is religious music marketed to atheists, agnostics, the confused – sure don’t forget the music lovers and ethnomusicological curious too. ‘Ambient,’ ‘psych,’ ‘world’ are all descriptors that act like gateway drugs for a listening audience whose taste has grown outside the circumscribed lines of Western pop music, broadly construed. There’s a ‘world’ of music out there in the world. Dive in.

Hats off to SOMA for bringing some unconventional music into conventional spaces. Or is it vice versa? Merch available.

The openers seemed like the type of band that can take a joke. Grails, a post rock band out of Portland (the far away one), probably can too.

Grails

But damn if the whole post rock schtick doesn’t seem like the most somber, killjoy music scene on the block. Everyone dresses in black like it’s a metal show, except they don’t valorize sex, drugs, or worship Satan. What’s going on here?

A slide show during the set projected what one supposes are supposed to be shocking, thought-provoking imagery and phrases. Like “Pagan Necromancy,” “Cattle Mutilations,” and some confused thoughts about the Mayan calendar and rivers flowing with blood. I saw the John Cusack film 2012, a Hollywood apocalypse. It’s 2024, we’re in the clear.

We’ve got real things to worry about, like climate change, neo-fascism, and Elon Musk spreading his seed. Or is the gambit a deep symbolism, playing to an audience that is beyond plain speech and now can only communicate thoughts in memes and runic graphemes?

Only time will smell.

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