CLUBLAND!

Doug Fir, Friday, March 23rd

There I was at home, it's about 8:45 and I'm thinking "I oughta look up who that first band is (Sun Angle), just to see" and holy heck it Northwest stalwart Charlie Salas-Humara (Panther and various other outfits) with Marius Lipman, AKA Copy, erstwhile winner of Willamette Week's band of the year (2006). Add to this Paper/Upper/Cuts Papi Fimbres on drums and flute (sometimes simultaneously) and you've got an intriguing proposition indeed. Trading in a persuasive, engaging brand of droney thrashy prog-psych-pop - let's call it prog-thrash with a mathy precision - bassline-heavy (courtesy Lipman; not a synth in sight), the trio turn in a head-turning set, gaining instant enthusiastic support from what's already a burgeoning crowd, who urged them into an extra song. From what I understand from some minimal follow-up research (thank you, facebook!), Sun Angle played last year's Austin Psych Fest, also to memorable reception. I have no idea whether the members of this band intend to remain in this incarnation but based on what I heard on that Friday night, we all hope so.

Last time I saw Point Juncture WA was PDX Pop Now! in (I believe) 2005. It was one of my then 6-year-old daughter's first live experiences and we both loved them, they were intimate, playful, inveterately tuneful if a bit DIY, charming but in need of maturation (PDX Pop Now! in a nutshell, eh? Why we love it). The intervening years have been very good to them.

If you've seen them recently, you know PJWA have a rather peculiar set-up, with initial/main drummer (they'll switch it up mid-set) Amanda Spring center stage handling or sharing lead vocals, Skyler Norwood on vibes to the left of her. To the left of him Victor Nash sits at a keyboard and with an arrangement like that is it any surprise they're melodic as hell, especially once they dig in to the three-part harmonies.

By such description you might expect something overtly baroque or pastoral but instead we get engaging quirk pop interrupted by bursts of rock wall energy. When Skyler switches to guitar - twinning the attack with Wilson Vediner - that energy amps up exponentially and the band lands in semi-avant pop territory with something close to Thurston Moore-ish shapes getting thrown around up there. Keeping things balanced are the combined voices of Victor and Amanda that, despite coming from opposite ends of the gender divide, share such similar timbres that they meld together wonderfully, thereby winning the harmony-of-the-night award going away.

PJWA are an inventive, restless band, and come mid-set number "When You Wake Up It's Today," Amanda is now at the xylophone, Skyler's on drums while Victor, though still sitting in position and contributing a piano part, is more prominently featured on trumpet, which throughout their performance is a highlight every time he brings that thing to his lips.

It's a short-lived arrangement, however, as for next song "Chronological Order" Amanda has again switched musical hats and now has a guitar strapped on and the song lets loose into a kind of sprawlingly confident Broken Social Scene groove (no wonder Nash has an Expos cap on) and proves to be their strongest song of the night.

PJWA is a band that has grown into their potential, and their hometown audience has grown in kind as they were lauded raucously by a crowd clearly happy to see them.

And speaking of rather peculiar band arrangements, let me just say that it's a bit odd the way that Cleveland band Mr Gnome's drum kit faces sideways, towards the center of the stage. Almost 40 years I've been going to shows and so far as I can recall that's a first. But once they come on and I've been able to crab my way edgewise into the by-now thronging crowd and settle in stage right, the set-up makes perfect sense.

In front of me guitarist Nicole Barille, a phalanx of petals at her feet (which she herself has arranged and tested)  and a lone microphone to her right, breaks out a stunning stream of sliced-up, innovative blues-rock riffs and rhythms, serrated, virtuosic. Facing her, husband Sam Meister is a powerful percussive force, a drumming prodigy clearly in proud pounding love with what he does. Often, Nicole will be laying out some lilting, haunting 'oh-oh's that lay like delicate incantations over Sam's furious, almost tribal drumming. It's magic.

On second song "Spain," from 2009's Heave Your Skeleton LP, Sam doubles up on synth keys while Nicole picks away at a, yes, skeletal calliope of a guitar figure which eventually loops into a backing track she sings over. Next song is "Bit Of Tongue" off last year's Madness In Miniature - from which derived the majority of their set, of course - Nicole singing with her warbling self by virtue of those many pedals at her feet and the result is transfixing. Sure, there's only two of them up there but the sonic reality is there's five, sometimes six of them: lead singer, back-up singer, lead and rhythm guitarist, drummer and keyboard player. To make it all work they need to stay in touch with each other - hence the drum kit's unusual placement - and it's clear the two are married more than just legally. Their interplay is intuitive and masterful, the intertwining of their lives inseparable from that one sees and hears on stage.

I've read descriptions of Mr Gnome that have used the phrase 'spastic hard rock.' That first adjective is, by any account, an utter mystery. Driving, staggering, barely-contained-but-precise, yes. Spastic, no. As for the 'hard rock' piece of it, to my ears they really only came close to that on "Pirates" off debut LP Deliver This Creature, which they tackle with their typical, rather relentless take-no-prisoners approach that, despite its all-out assault on our spinal cords, still comes at us wrapped in a blues-based groove.

Central to the band's power is the pure dynamism of the couple involved. Nicole's presence is at once forceful and enigmatic, her hair cascading over her face in a fizz waterfall, her voice somehow plaintive, defiant and desperate all in a single stroke. What you end up with a a tough vulnerability. That she's the guitar aficionado cannot go uncommented upon. Not because she's a woman taking that role but because she's brilliant, commandingly so. Sam, meanwhile, provides an unparalleled body of rhythm, an exacting fury of beats that both hews to classic rock templates and strays from them (or stomps all over them) with equal authority and dexterity, all the while maintaining a laconic demeanor in which it's impossible not to understand his full devotion to the task at hand (and feet - which were bare like a Shaolin monk's or something - punishing the bass drum pedal all set long).

What this all adds up to - the dual intuitive onstage communication, the mastery of multiple strands all at once, the instinctual rock 'n' roll dynamism (which includes, perhaps most crucially, their obvious innate familiarity with what's come before them), the charge and gritty urban sparkle, is a band that demands your attention and has every right to get it. Those qualities and that attention-getting were evident the whole time but especially on two tracks off Madness.. "Outsiders," a younger speedier and altogether more curious cousin to House Of The Rising Sun, and pre-encore set closer "Capsize," which barrels into your head like "Train Kept A-Rollin'" before blaring off the track and into those places where hell runs loose. Both were examples of a band that so transcends the limitations of a 2-person band as to make a mockery of that whole numbers game.

On a night that had Sharon Van Etten with War On Drugs at the Aladdin and Of Montreal with Deerhoof at the Crystal, both extraordinary shows I'd rather not have missed, I walked out knowing, without a doubt, that I'd been right where I should have been, right where I wanted to be.