Two Gallants at Bowery Ballroom
Two Gallants played the Bowery Ballroom last Monday. They did not wow me at the show but I have heard they knock some people's socks off at SXSW and elsewhere. Two Gallants make this western blues with explosive moments of punk rock. Adam Stephens has a raspy voice that walks the line between shouting and singing. He plays these endless melodies on his guitar that sometimes mirror his vocal inflections. Combine that with Tyson Vogel smashing out dense rhythm patterns with overlapping symbol crashes and this wall of sound is as thick as two instruments could make it. Most of their songs are slow and somber—the type of music you won't find me dancing too—but that did stop some people from starting a pit. I got checked a few times, which was annoying and distracting from the music. One guy got really violent toward the end and started high kicking, seemed right he left with a blood nose.
Read the rest of this review, see more photos, and get an MP3 after the jump.
Also check out Jerry Yeti’s review of Sam Champion (with MP3s!). Jeff at Central Village was also impressed. After seeing them Friday at the Loose Record party and then opening for Two Gallants, these guys are poised to make some big moves.
Two Gallants played “Long Summer Day” and I wished they hadn’t. The song is a story about a black man being pushed to violence, going “crazy” from all the racial inequalities in America, while the white man sits on his porch and feels “lazy.” Here is what Stephen has to say about it in a PopMatters interview:
“I got the first line of the chorus — ‘Well a summer day make a white man crazy’ — from an old work song that many consider goes back to the days of slavery. The version I have is sung by a man named Moses ‘Clear Rock’ Platt, although the rest of that song has nothing to do with what ‘Long Summer Day’ ended up being about. I guess it all just came from history books and public television, and I wrote it in the first person because otherwise it would have just felt like me sermonizing on something that happened long ago... and what good would that do?”
This song might have been written with good intentions but it is a complicated thing for a white man to write a song from a black man’s perspective. The main problem I have with the song is that it uses the N-word in the chorus while making the “crazy”/“lazy” comparison between black and white men. While the narrative voice might still be a black man, the all-too-familiar words of a white man nullify that voice. Regardless of the story in the song, I had trouble accepting the actual words coming out of Stephen’s mouth. And the oblivious and/or consenting swarm of white kids moshing did not help either. Have you heard this song? What do you think?
After bashing that song, you should check out Las Cruces Jail (MP3). The narrative voice is more consistent and Two Gallants actually do make some good music.
