Grand Archives & The Acorn preview
Grand Archives, The Acorn
Schubas, Chicago
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Band Of Horses may have had an uncanny sonic resemblance to My Morning Jacket, but they actually were writing their own tunes. They’ll have to continue without co-founder/songwriter Mat Brooke, however, who took his single “t” and founded Grand Archives.
You can peg the MMJ rap squarely on ex-bandmate Ben Bridwell. Grand Archives’ semi-self-titled Sub Pop debut — they add a The for whatever reason — gets its rocks off listening to The Beach Boys, Elephant 6 bands, and Pernice Brothers yet changes course so quickly and pointedly you can feel it’s a sort of catharsis for Brooke. Or a rebuke. His history with Bridwell, which extends two bands, wasn’t completely one-dimensional, but it was what it was.
It was never as plush as “Sleepdriving,” jubilant as “The Crime Window,” or Seven Dwarfs as “Miniature Birds.” If you were ignorant of the Brooke connection, you would never compare the two bands and so that’s where we’ll stop it. Not just flashing songwriting range, Brooke, basist Jeff Montano, multi-instrumentalist Ron Lewis, and drummer Curtis Hall craft a symposium on how to layer arrangements without choking the air. “Torn Blue Foam Couch” races with a Phil Spector-via-E Street grandeur; “Index Moon” plods like an iceberg because it’s nearly as dense; and “A Setting Sun” walks home barefoot from a lazy day at the beach. None of them particularly Horse around.
The Acorn are another entry in anti-folk’s awkward puberty, a.k.a. its streamlining. Trance-like meters, group vocals, and homespun arrangements lay siege to Glory Hope Mountain (Paper Bag), hints of fragility and spontaneity undermined by a poorly suppressed debt to The Arcade Fire and Beirut. What won’t make you give a shit about any of that is the tender moan of vocalist/Teuton Rolf Klausener, whose tenor is somewhere between Big Star’s Chris Bell and Califone’s Tim Rutili. The latter especially comes to mind on the Red Red Meat-esque “Glory,” though a sense of The Acorn finally surfaces in the tortured cello scrapes of the mounted “Low Gravity.”
The Builders & The Butchers open. This is a late show and separate from the 7 p.m. Peter Mulvey concert.
— Steve Forstneger
Click here to download Grand Archives’ “Torn Blue Foam Couch.”
Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly
