Theatre 1
Pile headlines a 4th Wall gig like you’ve never seen before at Capitol Theatre on Monday, 26 August 2024.
Edhochuli and Don’t Grow Old open the triple stack bill in the flagship screening room of Arlington’s second oldest palace of film.
Digital Awareness in the house.
The booker behind the local live music series Illegally Blind (puts together the Fuzzstival and more), Jason Trefts, is raising money to start a non-profit organization, staffed by brain tumor survivors, “that will provide free short-term care coordination services for people in the Boston, MA area recently diagnosed with a brain tumor.”
The mission of the project hits close to home for Trefts. In his own words, “I was diagnosed with an incurable Astrocytoma at 24 years old. I have spent the decade-plus since navigating chronic disabling conditions while working in the human services field.”
“Astrocytoma” is a type of brain tumor. And while Trefts has been dealing with that, he has also been working in care coordination himself, observing first hand how important the work is. His proposed non-profit would make more of that important work happen for more people. Find out the details and donate at the Still Around Gofundme.
Don’t Grow Old
New Bedford’s Don’t Grow Old was the first band of a three-band bill, all of which you could defensibly pitch as “post hardcore.”
Post-hardcore, what’s that? A heavy kind of music that continues to develop some of the high intensity, cadence, textures of hardcore music, but starts to pull back from the strict codification of aesthetics (and ethics?) native to the original genre.
Does that make sense? With a little tweaking that definition is vague enough to apply to any “post” genre, which is just fine. To paraphrase Ludwig Wittgenstein, sometimes the indistinct definition is preferable to the more exacting one.
The four-piece band released a cover of Unsane’s “Committed” back in February. Check it out.
Edhochuli
celebrity referee
You know this band has a sense of humor from their name. Edhochuli, after Ed Hochuli, the old and ubiquitous NFL referee. The average NFL fan doesn’t know a lot of referees by name, but they know Ed Hochuli, the silver fox, a minor celebrity, who contributed to the mini-trend of NFL refs with absolutely ripped torsos and tight, tight, tight black-and-white uniforms to show off the body.
The first thing you notice about Pittsburgh’s Edhochuli is their two drummers, who set up on stage with full kit and cranked out a massive percussive foundation in support of a psych-inflected, post-hardcore hootenanny. Rocking frontman.
The band has a new album out called Higherlander. Which includes songs like “Only Time Will Tell If We Stand The Test Of Time” and “I’ll Never Forget Ol’ What’s His Name.” The yukks never stop. But the rawking riffs are no joke and rip harder than Ed Hochuli’s pectoral region.
Pile performed as a four-piece on stage in Theatre 1 at Capitol Theatre, lit up like a Christmas tree in Ken Kesey’s living room, thanks to the video art projected by The 4th Wall regulars Digital Awareness. Was this the first 4th Wall show in the flagship screening room? Bigger, better, butter!
Pile
You’re always searching for the right words when writing about music, and so often the words ‘fan’ and ‘fans’ feel overwrought and out of place when discussing underground, alternative, or indie music and DIY shows. A fan is someone who pees in their poodle skirt when Elvis takes the stage.
Do we really have ‘fans’ in 2024?
Instead we have ‘stans,’ which are kind of “through the looking glass” versions of fans. People who relish the fact that they take an odd and unhealthy parasocial interest in the objects of their pop culture obsession.
But right there in front of me, seated in the second or third row of the flagship hall at Capitol Theatre, was a woman chatting about the show as her “29th Pile show.” And it struck me as fannish, not stannish. Why? Not sure exactly.
If you’re a local, you understand that Pile (or Rick Maguire solo) have been playing shows in the area for years. Plenty of shows, plenty of time to catch 29 if you’re a longtime local with a regular habit of attending underground rock shows. It’s not an achievement she intended to unlock, it’s not bragging rights in the parking lot of a Phish show, it’s not a central feature of her personality. It’s just a number. And it must have struck her as funny how the numbers add up, quickest of all when you’re not looking.
If there are ‘fans’ in 2024, they are people like this woman who might describe herself as a fixture in a particular type of scene or sub-community. Which doesn’t require a stannish fixation on this or that avatar of pop music. More like a general appreciation of the Platonic ideal of pop music as such, which recognizes that the importance of any individual artist or band is the degree to which they participate in this ideal, honored by, yet independent of, fans, stans, and artists alike.
Does that description of a ‘fan’ sound like a lukewarm state of being? Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The fan who stans twice as bright is a stan who fans half as long.
Photo Gallery
Pile plays a 4th Wall gig like you’ve never seen at Capitol Theatre.