braids / long long long / trees
21-01-2011
mavericks, ottawa
(when i get back to the alter-reality, something else will appear in this space.)
there isn't much of a story around this show: after a little bit of investigation online, i decided to walk a few blocks to the venue and check them out. the band was visibly scared; i think this was the first set on this tour, and i guess they weren't used to playing in random venues, like this. the stage jitters came out in the set, which had a few false starts and some very shy vocals (there may have been technical difficulties). it wasn't a bad set, overall, but it could have been a lot better, and i'd suspect they'd agree with me.
braids got a lot of comparisons during the period, and to the extent that there was some obvious aesthetic overlap, i always argued that they drastically improved on the acts they were being compared to. braids were always interested in writing concise pop songs and in exploring complex harmonic overlays in ways that the acts they were being compared to either weren't interested in or weren't capable of. the similarity in aesthetic was probably overblown to begin with (the reality is that this aesthetic was thirty years old by this point, anyways - the acts they were being compared to hardly had any claim to originality), but getting lost in it actually exposes a kind of surface interest in the actual music. you did not have to scratch the surface very deep to hear how different braids really were, and if you couldn't do that...
but, what i said was this: if you saw something of value in the aesthetic as it existed at the time, but found that it was being presented to you through musicians that lacked songwriting skills and were maybe not even interested in writing songs so much as they were interested in promoting a concept of fashion, then braids may be what you are looking for.
there is some ottawa footage up top, but here is a full set from guelph a week later (& a blurry picture of me before i left):
