Day Party Crawl
By Daniel Mee, Fri., March 20, 2009
End of An Ear In-Store
End of an Ear, Thursday, March 19
Having missed the fun but idiotically named We Were Promised Jetpacks, I begin the day with DM Stith, who does a falsetto-heavy take on the neo-Nick Drake style, with complex, intelligent melodies and singing that's quite good. A cover of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby," however, finds him breaking a number of set rules, chiefly "don't close with a song you've never played before." He trainwrecks it. Next up is K Records' Desolation Wilderness with a set of sunny and solid but pretty safe indie rock. The band's better at writing countermelodies for its chiming, echoing guitars than at singing, a skill balance that serves Desolation beautifully during a long instrumental passage midset. Maserati, of Athens, Ga., pulls off an ingenious reboot on its 2007 album, Inventions for the New Season, infusing post-rock with the sensual pulse of disco and borrowing compositional ideas from minimalism. The high point of the afternoon comes during the inexorable throb of "12:16," when drummer Jerry Fuchs tosses off a spectacular one-handed fill. Berkeley, Calif.-via-Bloomington, Ind.'s Odawas uses synths and delay to produce something like Cocteau Twins (minus Elizabeth Fraser) doing freak-folk. It's an interesting and attractive sound, but Maserati is a tough act to follow, so most of the audience is gone, and Odawas doesn't seem particularly confident or well-rehearsed. When the band trainwrecks the beginning of a song, the comedown is complete.
