Two Js Out, Two Vs In

Twin Flying V guitars take flight at Silhouette Lounge on Monday, 29 May 2023.

Fantastic Trees and Dyr Faser sandwich the three-stack bill.

The Celtics can’t hit their threes and lose Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals to eighth-seed Miami Heat.

The Silhouette Lounge isn’t a sports bar, but it’ll put the game on the televisions above the head of Bill the Bartender.

Especially a pivotal Game 7, pitting a suddenly underachieving Celtics against a Miami Heat team that won’t quit.

What to say about the game? Boston’s star ballers didn’t show up. Draw what conclusions you like about the Two Js-led squad. Jayson Tatum turned his ankle early on. Jaylen Brown was just having an off night. The team in green couldn’t find its three-ball. Coach Mazzulla has been outclassed by opposing coaches on the Xs & Os and game management all season.

Don’t pin the blame on the fans at Silhouette Lounge. Every little thing the Celtics did right earned gold star applause at the Allston dive, while the assembled faithful mostly tried to look away when Boston fumbled good looks and possessions.

Most fan bases would kill for a hometown team that consistently made deep runs into the playoffs. Feel about it how you like. Remember those Buffalo Bills teams in the 90s that kept losing the Superbowl? They were great teams.

But they never won the big one, and that’s what they’re remembered for. Are you starting to get that vibe about the Celtics current core?

Fantastic Trees

Fantastic Trees play the decade-surfing freedom rock. Shades of Rascal Flatts meets Clash in the Boston-based four-piece. Pepper it with a little War On Drugs. Salt it with a little Real Estate and Beach Fossils. Makes a fine stew.

There was a mountain of effects pedals at the guitarists’ feet. At a certain point you have to admit you have a problem. The rule of thumb is probably when your pedals cost more than the guitar. But how many guitarists have blown past that line in the sand? A lot.

Pedals are such sweet, sexy, shiny looking things with awesome names and cool buttons. Are they expensive? Sure. But the cost sneaks up on you in small intervals. Before you know it you’re lugging a huge suitcase of extra equipment to every 45-minute gig.

You’re like the old man from the Hemingway story who caught the huge fish but couldn’t get it back to port in one piece. What precise sound were you going for with that ravaged, sharkbit corpse of stompboxes at your feet?

Michael Bravata

Michael Bravata apologized straight out of the gate for playing his one-man style of dripping wet ambient guitar exploration. But he also politely asked the crowd to just “accept that.” So it was a kind of “sorry, not sorry” situation.

No apologies necessary. In the meaty middle of the three-stack bill, the Boston-based experimental musician wowed with arpeggiated fogbanks rolling over slippery samples. Loops and delays helped build up the cloud of sound.

Extra points for weaving in his own mom’s spoken word samples into the set. Shout out to the guitar effects pedal titled “OCD.”

And why do music writers (case in point) insist on calling certain niche types of music ‘experimental’? It suggests that the music is some sort of trailblazing forerunner of what all music will sound like in 5, 10, 20 years…whatever you like. But that’s clearly not the case. Ambient compositions using Bravata’s type of equipment have been kicking around for a half century at least.

The experiment has been experimented. The lab results are in: ambient music is good music, full of possibilities when done well, but the popular interest in the subgenre has always been modest and will likely remain so. Not an issue.

Dyr Faser

How do you pronounce this band name? Dyr Faser. It kind of looks like Olde English or something out of Game of Thrones. You know, like one of the rivals in a “court intrigue” subplot.

The local three-piece played a wet set, sopping wet with reverb and sopping wet on the floor in the backroom of Silhouette Lounge. Did someone spill a beer?

Shout out to the twin Flying Vs. It was a guitar, guitar, drums lineup, which meant not a lot of low end.

What do you do with all that Flying V power? Typically, when bands rock two guitars, whether there’s a bass or not, they will try to jiggle the knobs to make the six-strings sing with different tones. But these twin guitars, as far as the ear could tell, sported twin tones. Without proper tonal differentiation, the different guitar parts tend to bleed into each other.

Ever seen Glacier? The metal band performs with three guitars and a bass. You might think you’d have a worse problem with Glacier, all the guitar parts bleeding into each other. But they solve it by writing the songs to emphasize synchronization. The different parts don’t compete for different notes within the same tonal space and work together to produce this monstrous, muscular sound. Wouldn’t work for all genres; works for metal just fine.

Harmonizing disparate parts is a universal problem too. Just ask Joe Mazzulla!