THE ROSEBUDS w/ Love Language and The Preakness

Monday.1.December.2008

Ah, the dreaded Monday Night Show. I understand that the people who work in bars and musicians have no impetus to get up before noon on most days, but i work an 8 to 4 job, pushing the mouse around a desk for the man, and such shows are a pain in the ass for me. Few bands will drag me out on a weeknight, and The Rosebuds are one of them.

The Rosebuds are one of my favorites live acts, mainly because they are guaranteed to both play well and energetically. Even though I'm not familiar with their latest record, Life Like, my experiences with numerous shows by The Rosebuds has led me to the conclusion that the live version of their tunes are the best way to listen to their new songs. Simply put, their recordings always tend to be more languid than their live sets, and new music is always best listened to with a driving beat. Well, in my opinion at least. Either way, like the other folks with whom we met up, it was only a band like The Rosebuds who could drag me out on a work night.

Two openers tonight. Hey -- show organizers: can we please start doing only 1 (one) opening band on Weekdays? Please? I say this not only because i am sick of the late hours, but also because lately it seems that each time i go to The EARL and there are two openers, one of them is enjoyable, while the other makes me want to kill.

Consider our openers tonight. Up first was The Preakness. This is a fairly good Atlanta power-pop trio that have been around for a few years now. Tonight their regular drummer was absent, and the drummer from The Liverhearts was filling in. Odd. They play catchy pop tunes with boy-girl harmonized vocals, and lots of crunchy guitar riffing. Tonight the mix was a little too vocal heavy, but the guitars were mixed to sound like The Pixies. They were fun, as they typically are. Not a mentally challenging band, but they are still fun.

I don't find the substitution so unusual, considering that a couple of days later we would find the guitarist/vocalist for The Preakness subbing in on bass for….The Liverhearts. Clearly, there is a little cross germination between these two bands. Like Postlibyan, I thought the mix tonight for The Preakness was a little off, with the backing vocals of bassist Tracy Clark actually louder at times than those of guitarist/vocalist Brandon Arnold. Still, it was nice to hear The Preakness in concert again, as I really do enjoy their music.

Brandon and Tracy of The Preakness.

This was my first time seeing The Preakness. I was intrigued to see this band, though, having seen The Blue Hour, a former Atlanta act featuring a common band member, a few years ago. The Preakness didn't disappoint and their catchy tunes got me awake and looking forward to a fun night

And they we have the second opener, Love Language. This is a six-piece band from Raleigh that featured two keyboardists. Considering that the sound of a keyboard is totally lost in the guitar and drums mix of any love show, having two keyboardists is decadent.

But i can deal with decadence in the excess of instrumentation. What i cannot deal with is "lounge music". The band proceeded to play a 45 minute set of cheesy love ballads. The sound reminded me a lot of that time when The Autumns were trying to filter doo-wop through shoegaze -- it didn't work for The Autumns, and it certainly didn't work for this band. At their best, a few songs here and there, they sounded like Murder By Death without the overt silliness.

I wasn't particularly impressed by Love Language either. It was rather mellow (which is a trait that does not characterize either The Preakness or The Rosebuds), and at times reminded me of the early Saturday Looks Good to Me recordings mixed with the precious affectation of Ravens & Chimes, a band we accidentally caught at SxSW in 2008. So I guess if you want something kind of gentle and soft and cute (twee-lite?), Love Language might work for you. Unfortunately, it didn't really work for me.

Love Language lounge it up.

So they were terribly uninteresting. So, booking people, you see that you could have cut this band from the bill and no one would have minded. Well, i wouldn't have minded, and to hell with all those other people anyway!

So then The Rosebuds took the stage. They are on tour for Life Like, their fourth record. I had just got the album when this show occurred, so i was not as familiar with the new stuff as some people, such as busybody Minion Inspector Jason, who not only is training for a marathon, but also got the album on release and reviewed it within a week or so! Talk about making the rest of us look like slackers…

The Rosebuds are my people! I've been completely taken with the band since I first saw them in 2005 and they've continued to impress me since. There's just something uncannily irresistible about the band's blend of Deep South storytelling and danceable 80s alternative aura. The new album, Life Like, seems more like a culmination of genres that The Rosebuds have assimilated up to this point, so I was looking forward to seeing how these new tracks would translate to the stage.

It looked like The Rosebuds had a new rhythm section, but that is okay as the core of the band is guitarist Ivan Howard and keyboardist Kelly Crisp, both of whom take turns at the vocal duties. I don't know if it was the new rhythm section, or if they had just had too much coffee before the show, but it seemed as if all of the songs were played at a breakneck speed.

Kelly Crisp on vocals and tambourine.

I dunno. It seems to me that in concert, all songs by The Rosebuds get faster and guitarier and crunchier. This doesn't really bother me. Unlike the other minions, I'm a big fan of Make Out, their 2003 debut album, which certainly rocks more than anything they've done since. Go listen to Kicks in the Schoolyard, and get back to me...

Ivan still kicks it in the schoolyard...

This was my fourth time seeing The Rosebuds in concert and, for me, the band lived up to the promise of earlier gigs. This show was noticeably more guitar-driven than the band's last headlining show for their previous album, Night Of The Furies, was.

I have mixed feelings on the new material after this show. It was good and catchy, but nothing of the new stuff seemed as engaging as their work on Night of the Furies. So i don't quite know what to think. I do know that this show, while fun overall, was not the sheer wonderment that was the Night of the Furies tour. That was such a great show and a lovely time, and although The Rosebuds played well tonight, they didn't play that well.

Ivan and Kelly, caught at just the right moment in the light fluctuation to make them look
moodily buried in shadow. This is such an "emo" shot...

I really liked some of the new songs. They admittedly were more introspective and less expansive than the best songs from Night of the Furies. Certainly nothing presented had the "just dance, you fool" vibe of Cemetery Lawn. And nothing had the in your face Indie rock energy of Drunkard's Worst Nightmare (from Make Out). But those more familiar tunes really helped introduce the Life Like material and blend it into The Rosebuds' catalogue.

My favorite moment of this latest show was an outstanding New Order-esque guitar jam moment that Ivan Howard indulged in as the band played Get Up Get Out. This was one of many moments during The Rosebuds show that made me think of the early 80s concert footage from R.E.M., a band that set standards for spontaneous re-adaptations of their songs on a night-to-night basis while touring. Like those early R.E.M. performances, The Rosebuds' concerts thrive on the malleable nature of their music and one never knows whether to expect a keyboard-driven 80s goth feel for a particular song or a punk guitar-laced interpretation of the same song.

One word to heed when attending a concert by The Rosebuds is that, whether you are prepared or not, you are inevitably going to be part of the band's performance at some point during the night. The Rosebuds have always encouraged a degree of crowd participation in their shows and this night was no exception. Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp got the crowd singing during Shake Our Tree, an always faithful live offering from the band's 2005 album, Birds Make Good Neighbors, and during Nice Fox from the new album. The greatest crowd participation moment, of course, was when The Rosebuds requested specific people in the crowd to join them onstage for a comedic dance interpretation of Bow To The Middle, a lively track from Life Like that would make Johnny Marr of The Smiths envious.

Inspector Jason definitely hits on the one thing that makes The Rosebuds such a good live act: they do interact with their audience. The interplay between the band and the crowd really increases the energetic frenzy that emanates from the stage as well as within the club. It may be one of the reasons the band always plays so quickly – the energy drives them and takes them above what could have been just another night of music.

All in all, this was another fun show from The Rosebuds for the record book. At the end of the night, Kelly Crisp told the crowd that they would see us again in March. I have two marathons scheduled for March, but, if the band is playing on one of the off nights, then I can't wait to get some dancing in yet again for this band.