Forward Fest Day One: The madness of crowds
Ankur Malhotra
The Gentleman Loser kicks off the Reverence showcase with a dash of glitter.
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Madison's concert crowds rise, fall, and shift in the most unpredictable and exasperating ways, and Forward Fest only accelerates that. Local singer-songwriter Jeremiah Nelson began Thursday's first set to a near-empty house at the Majestic Theatre. Perhaps 20 people, if that, lurked at the Majestic's tables and bar as Nelson and fiddler/backup singer Shawn Drake opened with the song "Paper Mache." It's a shame, because the crowd that filled in slowly and later moved up front for Richard Buckner might've appreciated the way Nelson's vocals brought some comforting melody to touchy or downright sour lyrics on tunes like "New Tattoo" and "Run-On Sentence." (Nelson will return for a Friday Forward set at The Frequency with his band The Mysterious Bruises.)
Buckner showed up with just a few guitars, loop pedal, and an Ebow. Hunched over a clangy hollow-bodied electric, he built layers of strum and drone as he hauled up the close-up yet cavernous vocal melody of "Charmers." The end of the song seemed at first to trail off, then led into "I Know What I Knew," which similarly transitioned into "Put On What You Wanna," and so on. On Buckner's records, the songs can bleed together quite a bit—not in a bad way—so putting them into a flowing continuum only helped to bring out their subtle, lonely drama. The Majestic can either feel like a big, impersonal space or an intimate one depending on the night, but Buckner and the happily still listeners who clustered up front made the Majestic feel about as cozy as it can.
Still, the crowd enthusiasm there was a notch below that of this year's Reverence, an annual local fest celebrating the electronic, industrial, and gothy side of music, which migrated from its traditional north-side home at the Inferno to open at The Frequency as part of Forward Fest. (It continues Friday at the Orpheum Stage Door and returns to Inferno on Saturday). Moving it right downtown gave Reverence's usual audience a chance to pack into The Frequency's music room and perhaps mingle with people who might not otherwise give local industrial music a shot. The first set, from Madison duo The Gentleman Loser, involved plenty of industrial-influenced beats, a dyed faux-hawk, and facial glitter—but, intentionally or not, the mix of ambient, industrial, and spooky guitar lines provided a relatively approachable point of entry. Bonus points for ending the set with a cover of the Mister Rogers' Neighborhood theme song.
Davila 666 at Forward Music Festival from A.V. Club Madison on Vimeo.
Puerto Rican garage rockers Davila 666 make excellent music for teenagers to freak out to, so it’s a pity a few more didn’t turn up at the Majestic last night. This is a band with a full-time tambourine player, and it's understood that the crowd is supposed to sweat at least as much as he does. But four in-the-red singalongs deep, singer Sir Charles Davila (they all have Ramones-style handles) resorted to begging: “This is a dance song, so dance.” Everyone dutifully stood there and nodded their heads a bit more vigorously, until the irresistible closing song “El Lobo” sparked some last-minute rug-cutting before it was too late. Despite our collective timidity, the band was outstanding, and judging by all the enthusiastic head-nodding, the crowd totally dug it. Here’s hoping they return to Madison before long, with a longer set and a smaller venue.
GoldJessica Steinhoff
A year after we caught them playing the Frequency, opening act Gold seems to have smoothed out the edges of its clamorous post-rock a bit. While earlier tracks were distinguished by fitful rhythms and restless guitar work, the Chicago trio now seems content to settle into big, sludgy riffs. It has also invested in a Theremin, which one guitarist occasionally poked at with his instrument’s neck. The musical dots were well connected by the sound man, who put on The Black Keys' “Goodbye Babylon” after Gold's brief set. These days, the group sounds less like U.S. Maple and more like the Keys, which seemed perfectly fine with the dedicated longhairs nodding along up front.
A fork in a country road
“We're excited as shit to be back in Madison,” majestically bearded vocalist-multi-instrumentalist Brad Cook told the audience at the High Noon Saloon before his band Megafaun built its way into the lush Americana of “Kaufman's Ballad,” from the recent Gather, Form And Fly. Throughout the set, drummer Joe Westerlund was a total fucking animal. Whether Westerlund was nailing brain-bending polyrhythms, hurling his voice into three-part vocal harmonies, or using a violin bow to tug eerie swells from his cymbals, he made other-worldly contributions to the songs without taking away from the subtlety of the songwriting. Brad Cook and brother Phil moved through a mound of instrumentation: Phil switched between electric and acoustic guitar, sometimes even opting to pluck away at a banjo, and nailed the thoughtful melodies with his brother on tunes like “The Fade” and “Guns.” Meanwhile, whether Brad strummed his acoustic guitar or hammered away at his bass, he did it with flailing intensity, and often while singing the main vocal lines.
Megafaun—clearly stoked to have a Madison crowd show enthusiasm—glowed with energy, jumping into the crowd and belting out parts of songs from the middle of the audience, turning the crowd into a three-section choir, and throwing in random bursts of sonic discord that used noise loops from a laptop and some truly nuked drum fills from Westerlund. The powerful trio closed with a hushed rendition of “Tides,” during which it didn’t use the P.A. system at all (a trick its friends in Bon Iver pulled at the Orpheum Stage Door last year). After a stretch of applause, Megafaun came back out with an encore in the form of “Lazy Suicide,” from last year's Bury The Square EP, which most of the audience recognized and clearly enjoyed.
While Megafaun’s delightfully spastic flirtations with noise-rock and free-jazz connected well with the kraut-rock sensibilities of Madison’s All Tiny Creatures, who played an entrancing of their own earlier on, its Americana side matched well with Milwaukee’s Juniper Tar, who preceded Megafaun onstage.
At about the same time, Indiana trio Rev. Peyton's Big Damn Band incited more folks at the Majestic to move their bodies around with a fiercer take on rustic, folksy sounds. The Reverend blasted sweetly blistering acoustic slide-guitar blues licks while thumb-picking bass lines that connected the rhythmic chatter of drums and washboard like a railroad spike. Dispensing with long-winded solos or hokey turnarounds here, the Big Damn Band incessantly beat the small but fervent crowd into a mess of jumping, hooting, and spontaneous, drunken do-si-dos. There's also wildness to songs called "Your Cousin's On Cops" and "My Brother Stole A Chicken From The Fort Wayne Zoo" that makes people want to participate. Washboard player Breezy Peyton briefly lit her washboard on fire, and also grabbed a man in the crowd by the head and motioned as if slamming his face into the board nestled in her crotch. As the audience screamed along with an encore performance of "Two Bottles Of Wine," it was hard to believe these were the same people who'd stood back to politely for Davila just an hour earlier.
