Thu, 19 May 2005

review: maker of all/the reverents, amphouse, 10.21.04
The Reverents were literally a band of brothers, with Josh and Jason Armstrong on guitars and Jacob Armstrong on bass and piano, with the occasional live addition of Michelle Davis and Owen Pending on percussion. A slower, fuzzier variant of Chatham/Band of Susans intricate guitarwork, Josh and Jason provided the primary rhythmic element around which Jacob’s bass was more a distorted accompaniment, inverting the general structure of contemporary rock music. Too slow for amped-up punkrock kids, too loud for aging hipsters, and not heavy enough for the narco-Sabbath set, The Reverents never really found an audience around here, content to open for other bands and occasionally play scores for silent movies out at the drive-in.

In 1998, Josh and Jason Armstrong were killed in a car accident on Highway 63, driving back from a show at the Barbary Coast Opera House. Jacob, who was also in the car, broke three ribs and cracked his skull, spending the next two days in surgery at the U of I hospital. Jacob unsuprisingly fell off the radar for the next four years, taking a job at a bakery and marrying his long-time girlfriend Michelle. It was certainly a shock to hear the first Maker of All ep last December, with Jacob and Michelle developing electronically processed clouds of sound, basslines granually pulled apart and recontextualized as a sort of live instrument microsound. Although there have been two other eps released in 2004, the performance last Saturday was the first, and while I was pretty excited to see how Jacob would make this process work in a live environment (particularly one as noisy as the Amphouse), the idea of a Reverents reunion didn’t sit well with me at all.

The Maker of All show was quite a bit different than on the eps — much louder, first of all, and more distorted, with Jacob having swapped the bass for a hot-rodded Fender Jaguar. Michelle Davis-Armstrong sat behind a table filled with small electronic devices and the ubiquitous laptop, though any notion that she might just be checking email was quickly demolished as she lurked over the table, striking knobs and buttons like a cobra, racing back and forth in a mad dash to keep up with Jacob’s much speedier performance. The duo was joined by Manuel Sela on a second guitar, and his sharp jangled clusters of notes swarmed around Jacob’s relentless patterns, broken and refracted by Michelle’s effects into something both mathematically rigorous and alien in form. The crowd was much more animated than at any Reverents show, and the lack of breaks or stage patter only seemed to help (for once) maintain the jittery, vaguely menacing mood.

After the set, the stage cleared and the lights came up and two large televisions were wheeled to either side of the stage, and a small piano was moved up to stage center by Jacob, who then sat at the piano, facing away from the audience, and began to quietly play. Nobody could tell if this was a level check, and everyone kept chatting at the lights slowly came down, Jacob continuing to play quiet minor chords, until the two televisions came on. On the left, Josh Armstrong, looking all of about seventeen, sat in the family basement in front of a small practice amp and a slew of effects pedals, the sound wanting to be loud but coming out like a broadcast from far away. On the right, a tiny Jason Armstrong, perhaps ten, stood atop the living room couch with a starter acoustic guitar strapped over his shoulder, a little too big for him to play comfortably, so he takes his time getting to the fingerings, looking down at his left hand until he sees he’s in place, then staring back up at the camera, his face squinched-up in a mock frontman scowl as he hits the chord. While the footage of Jason plays at regular speed, the footage of Josh seems a bit slower, or perhaps he’s just stoned, certanly possible in his Misfits skull t-shirt and jeans with holes in the knees, staring at the amp like a scrying mirror. Josh’s fuzzed-out riffing falls into time with Jason’s cautious rendition of some impossible to identify cover, and Jacob plays between them both in space and in frequency, the notes hanging between Jason’s overwound acoustics and Josh’s trippy sludge-crawl. Occasionally one falls out for a second, Jason taking a little too slow up the neck, Josh bending over to turn up a distortion knob, but just as soon the three brothers are back in time, and suddenly it makes sense, that weird Reverents tempo, a metabolic hum like a churchbell they could always find a way back to, some eternal tone they had known since they first picked up their instruments, or perhaps even earlier, a pre-uterine echo they sought to embellish. All three brothers stop at the same time, with Josh looking up at the camera with a self-conscious smirk, mumbling “You call that rock and roll?”, while Jason takes off the guitar, placing it gently off the end of the couch, then bowing dramatically while a handful of other kids clap and cheer, ending with a pratfall somersault off the couch at the bottom of his last bow, and then the screens go to black as the cameras are turned off, and Jacob stands and walks off stage, and nobody said anything until the lights came back on.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #