When the Baltimore music blog
announced it was putting on a show to celebrate its first year of existence, it was hard to predict just what the bill would look like, other than that it would reflect the site's wide reaching tastes. When the Aural States Fest finally happened on Friday night at Sonar and the Talking Head, it was just about the perfect combination of familiar favorites and lesser known bands, most of which we were happy to be introduced to.
The first band onstage in Sonar's club room was Sri Aurobindo, a local quartet currently gearing up to release its debut album. The young band's clothes and hairstyles were as retro as the heavy pyschedelia of its music, but bass heavy grooves helped give it a fresh take on some old influences. When the Sri Aurobindo's last song ended with a jam that eventually petered out into silence, the singer shrugged, "I guess that's as good a place as any," and it was a strangely perfect ending.
The format of Aural States Fest, with half the bands in the Sonar club room, and the other half playing in the Talking Head space next door, was a great idea that offered a pretty constant stream of live music. Still, the arrangement was not without its technical drawbacks--the door linking the Talking Head to the rest of the building is right by the venue's stage, where the audience inevitably congregates. That meant that even when the room wasn't full, it was extremely difficult to get in and out of the Talking Head. And more often than not, I ended up listening to bands from the doorway, with a less than ideal view or no view at all. It's hard to hold that issue against the festival organizers, since I can't think of what solution there could have been, but it did put a slight damper on proceedings, and ended up motivating me to spend more time in the Sonar club room.
When I did make my way into the Talking Head on Friday, though, the bands heard--and sometimes seen--were an enjoyably mixed bag. A trio called Caverns played splashy, epic instrumentals in an unusual guitar/piano/drums configuration, and may have been pound for pound the most fun band of the festival. Cannot Be Stopped, the band name of a solo drummer playing over hyper electronics, was also an enjoyable sugar rush. And the indie pop band Title Tracks sidestepped their potential to come off a bit too twee with muscular drumming and tight, hooky songs.
Back in the Sonar club room, headliners Wye Oak and Arbouretum both performed big, stately sets. Wye Oak was playing its first show in months, and the duo, which has been busy recording its sophomore album, appeared a bit apprehensive about its return to the stage. Singer/guitarist Jenn Wasner constantly made jokes and apologies about the band's performance, and admitted, "I'm sick of our old record" toward the end of a set that only included two songs from its excellent debut,
If Children
. But apologies were hardly necessary, and the new songs showed fascinating growth for the band, including some more aggressive grooves, and drummer Andy Stack expanding his bag of multi-instrumentalist tricks to what appeared to be a melodica. Wasner was responsible for another one of the night's highlights later on, when she joined Arbouretum to help nail the high harmonies of perhaps that band's best song, "Time Doesn't Lie."
It occurred to us, throughout Friday night, that the Aural States Fest was something of a flipside to the
that also came to Sonar recently. Both were multi-band festivals that celebrated the variety of local music with diverse sets of musicians. But whereas the Round Robin shows displayed the Wham City side--with all sorts of costumed performance art, novelty bands, and avant-garde noise--Aural States Fest made a case for just how many traditional bands are making great music in the Baltimore area the old-fashioned way, writing songs and playing them well.
