The Sargent House Tour at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, CA

The Sargent House Tour, effectively ending after last night’s visit to the Troubadour in Los Angeles and tonight’s visit to San Francisco, featured some of the biggest names of the indie label. Digital Socket Award winners Adebisi Shank came all the way from Ireland to open, while Tera Melos, arguably the most famous of the trio, traveled only across the state from Sacramento to deliver their trademark pop-punk math rock. The night ended with a wild performance from Mexican ‘tapatio garage punk’ band Le Butcherettes.

Openers Adebisi Shank quickly established the kind of show it would be with their impressive use of pedals, breakdowns, and dancy yet simplistic beats layered over with a wall of tweaky and colorful guitar loops and riffs. With only three members, the amount of sound generated was both overwhelming and confounding. Standing at the bar of the sweaty and crowded venue, someone might be confused if they could not see the band clearly: how many members are on the stage? What instruments are they playing? The surprise is that Adebisi Shank is only a trio, and their sound results from a standard set-up: bass, drums, guitar. Most impressive in the live manipulation of sound was the guitarist, who shuffled rather easily through a chunky set of dynamic effects pedals, as he sometimes stopped playing all together to clap towards the audience or fist-pump while the surreal looping continued on its own through all the outlets and dials. Impressive as this was, the point of the music was still simple; the band just wants us to have a good time, maybe dance a little, and rock out when you feel the surge. The fact that Shank, and especially guitarist Larry Kaye, have found a new, relatively complex and creative way to inspire movement from an audience makes them worth seeing.

Once Adebisi Shank warmed up the crowd, four-piece Tera Melos jumped right into the math-rock world with a quick and dizzying display of constantly changing melodies and stop-start dynamics. Usually, the effect of musical density in a live setting can be disorienting or off-putting; how is a live audience supposed to feel this? But Tera Melos knows this, and has worked a surprisingly punk-pop aesthetic into the music. Guitarist/vocalist/pedalist (there’s a line between using the pedals to manipulate guitar and playing the pedals with your feet to create something wholly different, and this guy stomps on it) Nick Reinhart is a sight to behold, dancing like a dork while churning out incredibly intricate guitar riffs, often utilizing extended techniques such as tapping and feedback, and all the while kicking and shuffling over at least twenty pedals. The synchronicity between Reinhart and the rest of the band is deliriously exact, as the drummer pumped out tom and cymbal hits for every piece of manipulated riffage Reinhart could string together. This is the kind of band you go to see live to prove they could recreate the record; Melos was able to go above and beyond this expectation, even able to reproduce the melodic layered vocals and quiet sections of their songs with little effort and considerable flair. In between songs, the band left a wall of looping electronic sound, and then would burst into another song without visual or aural cue. Near the end of their set, the band began to experiment with colorful noise soundscapes and extended soloing by all members through indistinguishable effects and a ‘freakout’ aesthetic, just before returning to the song they had diverged from in the first place. Overall, it would be an understatement to call the band impressive; I have yet to see another band so up to the challenge of mixing wholly different genres (catchy pop-punk with complicate and convoluted technicality, soothing melodies with dissonant noise) creating something you’ve never heard.

Le Butcherettes finished the night, but after such impressive opening acts, the band wasn’t quite up to par. Even with The Locust drummer Gabe Serbian as a member, the music felt a little amateur compared to the expertise that had preceded them. However, on their own terms, Le Butcherettes were not at all bad. Lead singer Teri Gender Bender makes up for his lack in technical musical skill with a hilarious, eccentric, and memorably creepy performance that included screaming, wild facial expressions, constant movement throughout the stage, a burlesque dance show, crowd surfing and finally a crawl out of the bar and down the street to the sound of a squealing guitar feedback. Serbian, known for his light-speed drumming and start-stop dynamic, was a little dumbed down by the music Teri had written though, and was reduced to beats that were too often standard or conformed to the simplistic guitar playing and generic chord structure of the front woman. While there was little memorable about the music itself (the influences of the band were probably punk, blues, and garage rock, and felt like a medley of the three), the performance and energy made the band worth seeing.

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