The Crosstown Traffic

I’ve spent the last two nights in the deep, dank recess of Cumberland’s listening to the glorious present and promising future of Charleston music — namely, the incestously intertwined bands Lasso and Morimoto (plus a stellar performance from solo act Kaler, the nom de plume of Metal Monday and Michael Flynn regular Josh Kaler).

On Wednesday night, after an enjoyable set of clean, tight — not tight in that horribly soulless way, just in that “we actually practice” way — indie punk from Cincinnati’s Ampline, the three members of A Decent Animal (drummer George Baerreis, bassist Richard Weld, and singer Jonathan Nicholson) were joined by Lindsay Holler (who played keyboards but, sadly, didn’t add her smoky vocals to the mix) to perform as Lasso. The main difference between Lasso and ADA, it seems, is that Lasso bypasses the quiet, thoughtful musical meandering to cut to the rock. Lasso hearkened back a bit to Nicholson’s old band, Telegram, but with historical American underpinnings instead of British ones. Or something.

The ADA/Holler family is comprised of some of the most talented, interesting musicians in town. In case you didn’t already know from having seen Holler with her band, the Dirty Kids, this becomes readily apparent after one song from drummer Nick Jenkins, guitarist David Linaburg (both Dirty Kids), and organist Gerald Gregory, who make up fusion trio Morimoto. On Thursday night, that one song, the first one, consisted of the three CofC jazz majors playing some crazy acid-jazz business and yelling “DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS!” over and over.

It was just the beginning of a wild odyssey of unpredictable time signatures, fiery organ runs, a wider variety of sounds than you’d think a human could pull out of one measly electric guitar, and Jenkins’ it-looks-barely-controlled, but actually every-motion-has-a-meaning drumming — in fact, Jenkins’ foot was so into it that he totally decimated his bass drum, as captured in this picture by City Paper webmaster Joshua Curry.

What I saw of Kaler, most of whose set I missed due to being a wuss and not wanting to walk too far in the rain, was pretty f’in awesome. He’s got a cool one-man-band set-up, surrounding himself with instruments (guitar, bass (I think?), keys, LAP STEEL!) and using effects pedals to create loops, which he then plays along with. He got a visceral crowd reaction with his final number, a spot-on re-creation of the “dungeon theme” from Zelda, the classic Nintendo game. I got a huge kick out of watching the realization of what Kaler was playing slowly dawn across the faces of the crowd — one guy actually jumped out of his chair and said, “He’s playing ZELDA, man!” After the show, Josh explained that playing at least one video game song per show has become “his thing,” with previous shows including bits of bytes from Mega Man and Castlevania. I’m crossing my fingers for a little Klax action at some point in the future…

–sm