Smoke Bellow with Sunwatchers and Gold Dust

Schedule

Fri Sep 23 2022 at 09:00 pm to 11:30 pm

Location

Daily Operation | Easthampton, MA

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Baltimore’s Smoke Bellow come to Daily Op for their first New England show, with Brooklyn’s Sunwatchers and Easthampton’s Gold Dust.
About this Event

Smoke Bellow—the Baltimore via Australia trio of Meredith McHugh, Christian J. Best, and Emmanuel Nicolaidis—make their Trouble in Mind debut with Open for Business, a glorious and endlessly rewarding entry into the forever refreshing catalogue of “post-punk.” The trio breathes new life into the idea with its creative and playful kitchen sink approach, pulling as much from ESG, The Raincoats, and Marine Girls as they do Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Mazzy Star, and The Velvet Underground, while also citing the highlife guitar of Zani Diabaté as well as David Byrne & Robert Wilson’s The Knee Plays as key influences, the latter reminding them “of the joy of the spoken word set to music.”


Meredith McHugh has the right poise for the feat of that joy, her vocals coolly detached and warmly enveloping in changing breaths. “We’re the right stop,” she assures us on the angular album opener “Fee Fee,” the band entangled in rattling pipe percussion and alien beeps, art-pop horns and under the surface synth radars. “Hannan” carries more of a heavily buoyant ESG-inflicted beat. McHugh’s spoken word psychic dislocation—gazing out into the ocean but grounding in one’s own consciousness—places Smoke Bellow as very much a band for our time, freak bandits looking for beauty in a frazzled, chaotic loop.


Event Photos

Despite (perhaps) being the band’s most accessible & melodic work to date, New York quartet Sunwatchers‘ fourth album "Oh Yeah?" arrives in a flurry of notes with the buzzing hum of “Sunwatchers vs. Tooth Decay”; the title referencing a 1976 album featuring athlete and activist Muhammad Ali. A cheeky nod to be sure, but laced with the utmost reverence. This attitude sums up Sunwatchers’ aesthetic in a nutshell; the acknowledgement (typically via the band’s irreverent song titles or album art) that the things in life we should take seriously are better faced and understood when disarmed by a wink or nudge. The band may cloak their fiery activism in a jester’s outfit, but it does nothing to dull the force of their attack. The one-two punch of “Love Paste” & “Brown Ice” hits next, with the former’s tender opening melody punctuated by exuberant “WOO!”s while the latter launches into an urgent, stuttering march that utilizes an effective musical wind-up and release, ratcheting up a ferocious intensity across its near six minute runtime. “Thee Worm Store” closes out the first side, beginning with a lumbering synth growl, until it picks up speed and ends as a frantic noisy free-for-all. Side two strides forth with“The Conch”, an obvious ‘Lord of The Flies’ reference, and a delicious subversion of the idea of a “hero’s anthem” weighted down by the trappings of tribalism. The album’s showstopper however is “The Earthsized Thumb”, the near twenty-minute closing track. Guitarist Jim McHugh lays down a hypnotic Saharan guitar melody as the rest of the band ushers themselves in one by one over the tune’s distinct musical movements, a “Quick One” for all the heads perhaps?


The album’s title “Oh Yeah?” is at once an homage to Mingus, Thee Oh Sees’ album “Help” (whose Brigid Dawson hand-sewed the tapestry adorning the album’s front cover) and (naturally) the rallying cry of KoolBrave himself - the Kool-Aid Man-as-Braveheart avatar the band adopted as their symbol. The three years since the band’s second album (and TiM debut) “II” was released, has seen the band grace stages across the USA and Europe, enlisting more comrades in their mission of solidarity (sonically speaking) with every show.


In the months between wrapping up production on the first album and it eventually reaching the public, Pierce quickly began thinking about the follow-up. The reignition of a long-dormant interest in poetry brought a closer focus on lyricism and a deeper consideration of what the words were trying to express. The themes of isolation and self-doubt that floated in glistening clouds of reverb on the first album began to sharpen, and the language around these difficult feelings took on a new clarity. Pierce’s songwriting has always held a distant sadness, but with The Late Great Gold Dust, the melancholy cuts through, feels more present and alive within the songs. There’s a muddy narrative arc to these twelve songs, getting more harrowing throughout the album’s second half as screams echo in the void until an exhausted sigh that sounds something like acceptance rises out of the murk. This incremental ramp up from the album’s lighter material to its most depressive follows the same Side A/Side B mapping that made both Neil Young’s On the Beach and Black Flag’s My War different articulations of the same creeping intensity.


The Late Great Gold Dust steps into new dimensions musically as well. Pierce continues the layers of jangle, fuzz, and sunny vocal harmonies that made the first album equal parts tender and strange, but takes new risks with production, texture, and instrumentation. Album opener “Go Gently” erupts with near-metal doominess that fades into gentle folk softness, with layers of acoustic instruments and psychedelic fuzz melting together. “Proof of Life” builds around contemplative dulcimer parts, again stacking its instrumentation in thick layers. Throughout the album groggy synths and scene-setting field recordings work their way into dynamic arrangements that significantly expand Gold Dust’s depth. Pierce played every instrument and sang every vocal on the first album, and while he still handles the lion’s share of the performances here, he brings in several friends to add new angles to the tunes: guest vocals, moody Fender Rhodes, Hammond organ, damaged synth, and J Mascis lending his instantly-recognizable guitar with a “Maggot Brain” level solo on “Larks Swarm a Hawk,” the track that closes out side one. Eloquent weirdo Sean Yeaton of Parquet Courts contributes a short story for the liner notes, narrated from somewhere between the natural world and all the psychedelic computerized kitchens of the future.


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Where is it happening?

Daily Operation, 116 Pleasant Street, Easthampton, United States

Event Location & Nearby Stays:

Tickets

USD 10.00

Daily Operation

Host or Publisher Daily Operation

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