Head of Femur Hockey Night

If you ever find yourself in this kind of funk (not the P-Funk kind, which can be kind of fun), you should get your ass out to a show. It doesn't actually matter what show... in fact, the more obscure the bands are, the better. Because really, the records that come in the mail are the result of a long process and an endless array of filters. They're a year or so removed from the creative process and they're all about selling. The show is the process, and yeah, you have to pay to get in, but you're not buying stuff, you're buying a piece of that process. You're buying, in a sense, a little piece of a bunch of kids' hopes and dreams and ideas and passions, and even if it's not good as art, that's a good thing to subsidize.

The show on Sunday was pretty good as art, too.

We got there late, as the first of two unannounced (and local) opening bands was finishing up. I didn't even catch the first one's name, but the second one, Alchemy, was damned good. First off, an instrumental trio -- guitar, drums and keyboard -- hatched a very tight and fusion-inflected funk groove, distinguished mostly by an excellent keyboardist who kicked in both silky electric piano and skin-tight synth bass. A female singer joined the band one song in, lending a very credible diva-ish sheen. I was on the fence about Alchemy. The Return to Forever genre is just not my favorite kind of jazz, but on the other hand, no one's doing it anymore, so it was kind of cool to see a band swimming upstream like that. But then the guitar player, a clean-cut and likeable young man, announced that the band was very happy to be there, that they were from nearby Amherst where all four of them still attended high school. The fact that these kids were cranking out a very skilled take on a genre that ruled before they were born, and that they'd most likely have to get up early the following morning to catch a school bus, completely won me over. I should mention that the last time I went to the Flywheel, for Man Man, I caught another high school band call F-Thunder, whose members wore swimming costumes and cardboard box masks and played, as far as I can recall, almost entirely marching band drums. Their version of "Baba O'Reilly", entirely sung, including the keyboard parts at the beginning, was one of the funniest things I've ever heard. So, yeah! for high school bands and yeah! for the Flywheel.

Next up was Head of Femur, the Chicago-based prog-pop octet last seen opening for like-minded Architecture in Helsinki and, more recently, just off a couple of CMJ shows. Head of Femur's size fluctuates from a high of 24 members at their Ringodom or Proctor CD release party to a relatively modest seven-person contingent this evening -- just two guitars, bass, keyboards, trumpet, violin, drums and vocals. Still, even the streamlined line-up caused nothing but trouble for Flywheel's under-resourced sound team, who spent several minutes switching chords and running out for replacements before finding even one working microphone, and took nearly a quarter hour to hook up the full band. Head of Femur's singer, Matt Focht, told me later that the monitors never worked during the band's set; they couldn't really hear each other, but they proceeded with as much energy and enthusiasm as they would have if nothing was wrong. Their set was mostly drawn from this year's Hysterical Stars, a headlong rush through multi-part, multi-instrumented, joyously poppy songs that have been pushed to within an inch of prog.

Set highlights included the driving, jangling "Eliot Gould Is In California Split" ("a tribute to our favorite Canadian"), a punk-leaning, hiccup-rhythmed "Born in the 1970s" ("which neither of those two opening bands were") and, in a brief nod to their excellent first album, "80 Steps to Jonah". Overall, Head of Femur sounds a lot more rock and a lot less baroque and ornate on stage, though their songs still percolate with eccentric accents and sudden shifts in mood and tempo. Even stripped down, though, they're more complex than most bands, and the fact that they played this well without really being able to hear is a tribute to their skill and road-tested experience with each other. Also, despite difficulties, despite a letdown-sized crowd, they kept it fun, joking between songs and dancing relentlessly to their complicated, irresistible rhythms. There's nothing minimalist about Head of Femur. They slice open the rock formula, stuff an outrageous amount of filling into it, and garnish it with joy. But if you're hungry for more -- more exuberance, more sounds, more harmonies, more song movements -- it's exactly what you need.

Hockey Night, a band I'd heard about without ever actually hearing, was next. What I'd heard -- what everyone says -- is that they sound like Pavement. On the record, that's true, at least up to a point, as singer Paul Spranger has exactly the same kind of offhand drawl as Malkmus. On stage, he's less dominant, vocals melting into the mix and sounding hardly Pavement-like at all. He's tall, mop-haired and bashful, droning into a low-powered mic with only occasional glances at the audience. He moves spasmodically, jerking jagged eighth-note patterns out of his guitar, now kicking one leg or the other backward from the knee, now bending in half over a power chord, now facing the drummer. He's balanced by Scott Wells, blonde, bearded and looking just like I'd always pictured Jesus Christ, except that he's wearing that Boston t-shirt with the spaceship on the front and all the song titles on the back. Wells plays way, way up on the bridge of his guitar, coaxing out those sweet, eerie high notes that Duane Allman used to favor. In other words, if Hockey Night sounds at all like Pavement, they sound like Pavement crossed with the Allman Brothers and laced with Thin Lizzy, enough so that Spranger introduces one song as "Lizzie" and when Matt Focht yelled out "Jailbreak!" afterwards, one drummer cracked, "We just played that." As you might have picked up, the other interesting thing about Hockey Night is that they have two drummers, arranged side by side on Siamese twin sets of drums. They play almost identically, cymbal crash after tom pound after snare lick -- so much so that, when one drummer dropped a stick, I looked over to the other to see if he was short one, too. The bass player was solid and unmoving, standing to the side in his "Andy's Hardware" trucker hat and keeping the rhythm section in line.

The band stuck largely to material from its newest album, Keep Guessin', released earlier this year on the ill-fated Lookout label. They opened with the disc's first track, "Get Real", all barbed, dueling guitars, and hit pop-rock highlights like "For Guys Eyes Only" and "Saturday Night Gallop" as well as harder cuts like "Grim Break". Slower songs, like the sleepily gorgeous "Renegades", showcased the dangers of the double drummer format: bored with the momentary pause in the action, one started playing with the gold streamers hung on the Flywheel stage, while the other made farting sounds with his armpit. Still, the song was quite lovely -- tender, full of liquid guitar licks and sensitive lyrics, and though they temporarily lost the percussion section, they didn't lose the audience; the entire (very modest) crowd was rapt in the moment.

So that's two good, interesting bands on the cusp of wider attention, and one likeable baby band making, most likely, its first club appearance, all of them unconcerned about current musical fashions, just doing what they do. It's the best antidote for music reviewer's fatigue. I returned to the to-do pile refreshed and ready... until the first strains of that heavily-hyped Mooney Suzuki-lite band hit the speakers...

Article by Jennifer Kelly. Photos by either Jennifer or Bill Kelly, Jr. (I forgot to ask)