Tag Archives: Mercury Lounge

This is not an exit: Washed Out, pictured above, opened a tour with Small Black and Pictureplane last night. (3/7)

A line of graffiti scribbled on the men’s room wall at Mercury Lounge reads: “The cunts is everywhere … u wanna be.” It’s a humorous jab borne of economic frustration, representative of a younger generation bracing itself to inherit a nation plummeting into decline.  No sentiment could better set the stage for the self-proclaimed “chill-wave” tour that opened last night in New York City, as a crowd of indoor types stood for several hours to watch young men blast tinny music off of laptops and prerecorded sequencers.

Travis Egedy of Denver, aka Pictureplane, opened the night with a violent barrage of synth riffs that sounded like they were designed to murder Bob Dylan.  Brooklyn based Small Black presented the middle act.  Their name works as a pun on the post-punk band Big Black, fronted by Steve Albini.  But where Big Black wrote furious, at times reactionary songs in the DIY spirit, Small Black infuses Albini’s familiar echoes and dissonance with the type of Flock of Seagulls structures, and lyrical apathy his music reacted against.  Small Black would do well by revisiting the economic urgency in Albini’s words: “Never anything to do in this town/sit around at home/stare at the walls/stare at each other and wait till we die.”

After all, it’s that very sort of economic urgency that propelled Washed Out into a headlining gig on this tour.  Ernest Greene is a young man based out of Georgia who discovered music via the Internet, and recorded his E.P. [Life of Leisure] in the privacy of his own bedroom.  That’s the cheapest, most self-sufficient way to  create pop.  And, since a live act was not originally a consideration, the performance was naturally clumsy, and at times, strange.  But that displacement gave the concert a much needed injection of humanity.  When Small Black returned to the stage to add backing instruments to Greene’s more familiar tracks, he gushed with nervous relief:  “Isn’t it nice to finally have a real band on stage?”  A naïve charm like that will help to make Washed Out the most accessible DIY act of its era.  Greene’s best songs, “Belong,” “Get Up,” are rich with a gentle approach to melody, and a small town sense of drama that can’t be easily duplicated.  Even with sometimes murky vocals, the refrains are always of a personal nature: “Trying to find a world where you belong,” and “Gotta get up, gotta get away.” When these songs were performed at Mercury Lounge with a humble acknowledgement of their limitations, and a confidence in their appeal, it changed a fragmented crowd into something more like a community.

But the performance still felt like a work in progress.  Even though Greene, an outsider, successfully reverted cultural trends by adding new layers of sincerity and emotional vulnerability to a class of music that had not previously seen them, he still has room to grow if he’s ever to compete with that truthful line scribbled on the men’s room wall of Mercury Lounge: “The cunts is everywhere … u wanna be.” People are frustrated with their lives. The path to respect, and social maturity in 2010 is often blocked by forces beyond our control.  And, once you’ve approached a New York audience to tell them that you “Feel It All Around,” as Greene did when performing his breakthrough single, it’s only natural for someone to eventually yell back the reply: “Feel what? “