Rachel's

Doug Fir Lounge - November 1, 2005

Live Review by Michael Byrne

When was the last time you wanted to be in a church?  In an honest sense, I mean.  Not to get your irony fix and not for "social research," I mean.  Been a while?  It's an odd, vaguely romantic feeling when it happens: the gentle finger stroke of the unknown, the relief of supplication, the quiet of humility.

That's the word we're looking for: quiet.  How we underestimate it, it's power as a signifier, what it means for us to shut up.  What an event that is.  None of this is intended, of course, to compare Rachel's to G-O-D, but putting the nearly sold-out Doug Fir Lounge into absolute silence is a feat worthy of a two paragraph introduction and massive italics overuse. (They were whispering their drink orders to the bartenders.)

Rachel's played a double-set opened by Tristeza, a band whose art consists of processing classical forms into indie-rock Musak.  It's all reasonably smart, passionate, and moody, but in the Rachel's context they're almost insulting.  Not everything has to be fortified with marching rock percussion and massive amounts of electricity.  Drown the subtle and you're left with Musak.  The opener's opener, Invert, didn't help Tristeza's case either, representing an early Songs for Egon Schiele version of Rachel's, with nary a drum stick to be found and abundant light-hearted major key melodies. 

The instrumental System/Layers was played nearly in its entirety, with Invert's strings completing the band in the first set, making for about ten players on stage, performing before a film backdrop that perfectly matches the urban portrait soundtrack of said album.  The images were simple series of urban landscapes–pedestrian silhouettes, your building's fire escapes, concrete-borne city snow–presented with that sense of the unintentional that the city itself usually presents them. (See also: Matt McCormick, who commands perhaps the most developed language of urban aesthetic in film.)

Systems/Layers is a precariously fragile piece of music, comprised often of a bed of urban field recordings set beneath spare strings playing frequently counter intuitive antimelodies: exercises in suspension rather than progression.  Holding the attentions of the Doug Fir crowd with these pieces of glass is nothing short of momentous.  During the off-key viola holds of "even/odd" it was difficult not to wonder when someone's drunk friend was going to snap and blurt "but Denise, I'm hungry" or something worse.  It's an act of faith to play something like "packet switching" to a bar crowd, with it's solo viola introduction, and slow harmonic build, but the inward-gazing Rachel's made it clear that it was a faith in music rather than people.  That is, we are all vulnerable.  That is, we were all lucky to leave the Doug Fir alive.  When the piano/string harmony of "Water From the Source" becomes airborne it threatens to take us all with it, bottom lips dripping with the blood from our exploded hearts.

So, yes, the last time this writer wanted to be in church was November 1, 2005 (after who knows how many years).  But, less than two hours into November 2, he got the point:  confronted with something that makes us all shut up together, we're already there.