Musical genres are really tools for record labels and promoters more than for musicians or listeners. This often doesn’t favor the artists who exist in the margins of genres, or who have synthesized their influences into something new.
Last Wednesday’s show at BAR, part of a long-running series organized by Manic Productions, brought together Kayo Dot, Shilpa Ray, and Hex Inverter, three bands with varying displays of irreverence for genre. Their restlessness drew their disparate musical worlds closer together, giving coherence to a bill that touched on goth-rock, industrial, ‘60s pop, trip-hop, and prog.
Hex Inverter kicked off the bill with their first-ever live performance as a four-piece, expanded from the trio that recorded their self-titled album last year. They strung four songs into a near-continuous set that sustained a meditative mood with hints of anxiety, mellow throughout but colored in contrasting ways thanks to the varying use of synths, guitar, bass, and programmed drums.
Live, the band channeled elements of industrial, trip-hop, and new wave, particularly due to the prominent drive of the bass guitar and steady programmed beats forming a lockstep rhythm section. Earlier songs were driven by layers of cold synths and guitars, with harmonized, chant-like vocals; the band’s last song kept a mid-tempo pulse but took on a more sinewy form of rock, driven to operatic levels of tension by a droning synth chord.
Their live sound is something of a surprise compared to the more shoegazey elements in parts on their self-titled album, but the rapport Christian McKenna (vocals/synth) and Mick Mullin (guitars/synth) have from another band, Empty Flowers, helped the band navigate the performance smoothly.
A lot of descriptors come to mind with an artist like Shilpa Ray, some of them contradictory. The band is driven by the singer’s powerful voice and the pulsing drone of her harmonium, but the top-heavy live sound and a tightly wound use of the group’s instrumentation allowed the music’s boundaries to shift from section to section. Within one song, a pristine figure in harmonium and pedal steel reached psychedelic heights before giving way to 32 bars of punk-inflected rock and roll. The harmonium’s wide sound glued these disparate elements together, sounding like a faraway choir or string section in quieter moments, and adding a Hammond organ-like boost to the more driving sections.
Ray’s songs presented a wide range of influences, but did so with great organization and economy. Two or three chords and a good hook were enough foundation to support the band’s expeditions. Ray’s vocals, easily at home in punk, also had more soulful qualities, a confidence of inflection and rhythm reminiscent of traditional folk and blues songwriters who’ve played their songs thousands of times, no matter what is raging on behind them.
Kayo Dot has embraced the idea of being difficult to market by referencing genres or other artists. The band has undergone several shifts in recording and touring lineups over the course of the last 12 years. Singer/bassist/composer Toby Driver’s voice as a composer has become more clearly defined within that time as well, and his music for the band’s latest album Coffins on Io is a display of close interplay on a grand scale, full of gorgeous synth textures and driving, sometimes deceptive rhythms. The band has slimmed down considerably over that time — it’s now a quartet — and the approach to the music has become leaner, less reliant on overdubs.
The band pays great attention to detail when configuring their live sound (check out the panned delay on the voice in this untitled song), closely aligning the worlds between their live and studio presentation. With music that has as much rhythmic drive as this does, this feels like an honest choice.
The band has had a difficult time shaking the metal label, which isn’t to say that they’re not heavy. The music on Coffins on Io packs an uncompromising punch when it needs to. But the elements of various genres, spinning a web on the fringes of goth, prog, and ‘80s art-rock, are too thoroughly synthesized, one alchemical change too many, from being immediately recognizable in the mix. Live, the band used repetition in a tremendous way, evoking trance-like states with lengthy sections of riffs and then pulling the rug out from under the listener with a subtle change, seeming in context like an entrance from another world.
And ultimately, that was the angle that unified the evening: the ability of each of the bands, despite covering a huge amount of musical ground among them, to place their choices in a context of their own devising, through the songwriting, the playing, and the mix. The end result may have been harder to market, but it was full of deceptive pleasures.
Hex Inverter Returns to BAR on Wednesday June 24 with Giant Squid and Burrows. Shilpa Ray plays Cafe Nine Saturday July 11.
