Sitar? I Hardly Know Har!
Elephant Stone slips back into the dream at The Rockwell on Sunday, 24 March 2024.
Evolfo revels in Rat City while the Tiger burns a Witch.
Rishi Dhir on sitarEvolfo describes itself as a seven-piece band. The Brooklyn-based psych rockers showed up to The Rockwell in Davis Square with five musicians.
That’s not a complaint, it happens all the time with touring bands. And it’s food for thought in terms of what is an underreported feature of live music: how elastic bands and their songs are, or are not, in terms of permitting different constellations of available band members.
Who can forget the scene in Spinal Tap when the band is trying to piece together a setlist backstage at a festival, having lost their lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel. Without him they can only play “Big Bottom” (and that’s only if Viv Savage plays Nigel’s bass lines on the keyboards). About five minutes of material.
The solution? Jazz odyssey…
Most bands are prescient enough to plan ahead. Nigel hasn’t left the day before. They know before they leave on tour how many and what kind of membership they’ll have available for gigs, and they’ll hammer out the necessary musical arrangements in advance.
Just as permutating membership is an underreported feature of live music, so is the ability to permutate effectively. It’s often a fool’s errand to try to sound exactly how you might sound with the full band, faking it with backing tracks. That strategy can go wrong easily, sounding tinny and inauthentic.
The best musicians will find a way to reorganize the musical concepts in their music to fit the available musicians. Maybe the resulting song sounds the same, maybe it sounds different. Either way, pull it off and it works.
Tiger Witch
New band, veteran musicians. Maybe their first live show? Tiger Witch already has a tape for sale with six songs on it, titled Demo 24. Is it still a demo if it gets released? Seems like it would not be a demo at that point. Not to be confused with Mercy Ruin’s Demonstration. Extra points for letting your 5-year old name the band.
Evolfo
Here’s the band that slimmed down for the touring ensemble. Evolfo!
Says a lot that the saxophonist was included as part of the core. Shows a real commitment to the horn, which can sometimes be an add-on for some rock n roll outfits. Extra points for the largest collection of pedals at the foot of a saxophonist that I’ve ever seen. This is a band that likes to muck things up, tinkering with textures atop a solid rhythm section.
And here’s where the scale of the band comes into play. With the full complement, whether in the studio or live, Evolfo hits more of those late 60s big psych band notes. You know, an uptempo tarmac full of Jefferson Airplanes.
Slimmed down a bit to a five-piece, and some of the same compositions sound more lithe and angular. The driving rhythm of the bass and drums gets a bigger share of the pie. Without the extra musicians to add extra layers of sonic texture, your ear gets drawn closer to the melodic bones of the music, and the work done by the melody to propel the song forwards.
A more danceable groove starts to emerge from out beneath the psych haze. Or to put it another way, it’s like a band in 1969 transitioned from its acid phase to its blow phase. Out with the old excess, in with the new excess.
But, presumably, it’s roughly the same setlist that you would flex with a seven- versus five-piece? So numbers matter and they stir the soup in surprising ways.
Extra points for the “Rat City” track. Next up, Ferret City.
Elephant Stone
Extra points straight out of the gate for the La Sécurité t-shirt on the drummer. Elephant Stone must have just played a gig with them? Or maybe it’s just that both bands are from Montreal, and they love to give each other shout outs at home and abroad.
The set started with the frontman Rishi Dhir rocking the sitar solo on a dedicated platform. You really need that dedicated platform at The Rockwell because there’s no raised stage to begin with. The standard sitar position is a kind of cross-legged sit. If Dhir had to do that on the ground, we all would have been staring at the top of his head. In any event, the sitar never fails to set the mood.
As a four-piece Elephant Stone delivered airy, medium tempo, pop-forward psych rock. Dhir set aside the sitar to handle a more conventional electric guitar. And there was a Mellotron sighting among the stack of synths that the keyboardist was hammering. This is a band that could talk your ear off about niche music technology in the corner of a gala opening. And le Conseil des arts du Canada loves them for it.
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