Le Fleur, the Raven and the Writing Desk and Color Animal @ the Red Room (6/29/13)

Le Fleur was one of the handful of bands who made me think, "Hey, there's something going on in this here Boise music scene."  So when I learned that this would be their last show ever, I felt obliged to go and bid them farewell.  Talk about the Raven and the Writing Desk's dynamite performance at the WavePOP house gave me extra incentive to check this show out.

I counted twenty people when I got to the Red Room.  When Le Fleur took the stage, I counted around ninety (there could've been more).  A fine turnout.

Unfortunately, I worked the closing shift at a new part-time job, so I missed Storie Grubb's opening set.  Oh well.  Hopefully, I'll get to see/hear him and the Holy Wars soon--they've been working on some promising stuff lately.

Color Animal sounded murkier here than they did at the Flying M; I couldn't hear the guitars weave together quite as well.  Most likely, this was just due to the Red Room's acoustics.  Anyway, that was a pretty minor quibble since they sounded just as tuneful and rocking as they did the night before.  Hopefully, the slightly larger crowd will encourage them to come back around sometime.

The Raven and the Writing Desk played next.  One gentleman described this Denver band to me as sounding like King Crimson joining with the Dresden Dolls to cover the Murder City Devils and Black Sabbath.  That trumps pretty much anything I can come up with ("a more symphonic Tom Waits or Murder By Death" sounds awfully weak by comparison).  Eerie violin, rumbling drums, crunching guitar, pounding piano and cool xylophone swirled around Julia LiBassi's soaring, swooning moan and cabaret-tinged tunes.  Would've made a helluva double bill with Minor Birds.  They'll be back, LiBassi said.  I hope so.

Le Fleur closed out the night with possibly their best set ever (that I've seen).  Their steady, relentless rhythms and howling fog of guitars sounded good and fierce.  Meanwhile, Ivy Meissner worked some grit into her growl, snarl and wail.  The crowd bounced, swayed and cheered wildly as the band scraped their repertoire bare ("At this point, we really only have a couple left.  For reals!").  It's sad that there won't be any more of this.  Still, a very fine note to go out on.

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Talkdemonic, Mwahaha and Le Fleur @ the VaC (11/2/12)

I'd greatly enjoyed Talkdemonic's performance on the Treefort main stage, so I got excited when I saw that they'd be coming back to Boise.  This show attracted me too because it featured Mwahaha, a group from Oakland, CA whose Treefort set I'd missed.

I got a little worried when I arrived at the VaC and saw only twenty people there.  Thankfully, that number would triple as the night progressed.  And that meant not only plenty of ears to hear the music but plenty of eyes to see the montages crafted by the dudes at antimagic.

Local band Le Fleur opened the show.  I was going to write that this might've been the best performance that I've seen by them yet, but I actually wrote that in my last post on them.  In any case, their solemn vocals, droning guitars, spare basslines, quietly intricate drumwork and hissing, blaring synthesizer all sounded in outstanding form.  Their strengthened groove gave the music extra power.  So did antimagic's montages, whose abstract images underlined the music's ominousness and whose cheery clips from 50's and 60's films provided an ironic counterpoint to it.

Next up was Mwahaha.  Their low, submerged vocals, chiming guitar, tribal beats and squeaking, burbling, whirring synth made me think a little of the Sisters of Mercy gone trip-hop.  The pulsating lights, swirling and sparkling squares and distorted cityscapes that antimagic had crafted for this set made me think a little of the star gate sequence in 2001 (i.e. the part leading up to Dave Bowman finding himself in the weird-ass bedroom).  The two elements combined to create an otherworldly atmosphere in which the audience could lose themselves.  Fascinating stuff.

Talkdemonic closed out the night.  I likened this Portland group to Gary Numan in my Treefort Day 2 post.  Hearing them live again, however, they made me think more of Vangelis but with much sharper beats.  Whatever the appropriate comparison, their droning, screeching, rippling violin and synth hooks, their man-meets-machine drumming and their simple, memorable tunes sounded just as wondrous the second time around.  Probably more so, in fact, thanks to their smoke-and-laser show and the snowflakes, cascading water, flashing squares and zigzagging blobs of light of antimagic's montages.  I wonder if Ridley Scott's looking for people to do the score for the Blade Runner sequel.

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Le Fleur and Helvetia @ Neurolux (8/23/12)

It occurred to me that, while I've written about Dark Swallows a couple of times over the past few months, I don't think I've written about its precursor of sorts, Le Fleur, since Treefort.  Last Thursday's show at Neurolux gave me the opportunity to correct that wrong and to check out a Portland band unknown to me.

Because I took a friend out for an impromptu birthday dinner, I wound up making it down to Neurolux later than I'd planned.  Luckily, I arrived near the beginning of Le Fleur's set.  I counted about thirty people at that point, and the crowd would build to about fifty if not more as the night progressed.  Maybe everybody just wanted to cut loose some before classes started up again at BSU.

Le Fleur opened and gave the best performance that I've seen by them yet.  Seeing Dark Swallows so recently enabled me to compare and contrast these two groups' respective sounds.  While Ivy Meissner's somber vocals serve as just one thread in Dark Swallows' weave of echoey voices and guitars, Le Fleur's more spartan sound makes them the centerpiece.  Since Meissner's singing stronger and smarter than ever nowadays, however, she can bear the exposure.  Her bandmates aren't exactly slouching either: their glinting guitars, screeking synth textures and dynamic drumming never sounded so locked-in and focused.

After Le Fleur came the Portland-based group Helvetia, whose tuneful, ominous, shoegaze-tinged rock went down very smoothly.  Too smoothly, perhaps--their high, pensive vocals and polite drones and dirges threatened to make my eyelids sag, howling guitar solos notwithstanding.  The touches of psychedelic hard rock in those solos as well as the organ-like synthesizer parts, supple basslines and tough drumming made me think of Atomic Mama on downers.  This music may be a little too placid for everyday use (in my case, at least), but it'd probably sound great late at night when your mind starts playing tricks on you.

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