Nadja - Live

A much-anticipated show, and I almost forgot to go.  I was busy playing with the family at our neighborhood block party, performing in the yearly gong show with Everest, drinking a La Fin du Monde.  I knew going into it that after a full day (soccer game included) it might be hard to muster up the energy to pull this off.  But it's Nadja.  They're heavy, but oh so chill.

Before seeing them I knew it was going to be a pretty lax show.  If you've ever heard a Nadja record  you know what you're in for.  Dense maelstroms of distorted guitars and alien effects all swirling and shimmery as a sloooooow, plodding drum beat pounds you into oblivion.  Metalgaze?  Ugh, horrible term.  Nadja are interesting because, even though Aidan Baker and Leah Buckaroff have refined their musical style to the point where they have many imitators, they never seem satisfied.  They releases so many albums (about one every two months on average) on different labels and in different formats it's probably hard even for them to keep up with what they've made.  And that's the straight-ahead attitude I've come to enjoy about a lot of my favorite artists.  Sure I love Tool, and I appreciate the fact that they take five years to craft their records.  But Aidan Baker seems to press the record  button, like, every week, and something good comes of it.

More proud than anything just to support these artists, I stepped into the Rickshaw Theater dressed as a dapper dan.  Fedora.  Overcoat.  Mexican wedding shirt.  This theater is very new, quite cavernous in size, especially when about 40 people come to a show.  Forty ain't bad, considering it was only announced a couple weeks prior.  I always wonder about the people who attend obscure shows like this.  Would I want to hang out with them?  I'd probably rather hang out with Aidan and Leah.  They are both fairly short and have understated personalities, I would learn after the show.

Nadja are not a big show.  They have visuals, which were humongous on top of the tall back wall.  They were really pretty, getting more colorful and complex as they played.  Aidan plays a guitar and a suitcase.  All his pedals and tubes and effects are stored inside this pudgy luggage that he sits atop a table.  Leah, meanwhile, plays her bass with her back to the audience.  I usually find this annoying, but it's probably a focus issue.  Nadja's music isn't so much "Let's do this together, audience" but more "Here is what we do" so it doesn't matter if you interact with the crowd.  

Most of the songs they played were from an album called "The Bungled and the Botched" which was released a couple years ago, very limited, on CD.  This year they released it more widely on vinyl.  I honestly didn't care for the songs, on the whole. There was one where they both were using violin bows to make their guitars creeeaaak and shimmer.  It was highly atmospheric, all kinds of sounds fluttering about.  While the plod was kickin', the drum machine didn't sound all that good.  A painful reminder that a live drummer would just be so much better.  There was even a drum kit on stage, and I still don't know why.  No one used it.  Such a tease.  

A lot of it was improvised amidst the general structure they had laid out.  Aidan, turns out, is a really good guitar player.  He was sometimes really wailing with his synthetic effects turned to the max, and was completely buried within the melee of sound.  Pretty cool.  Nadja go up there and do their thing.  Not really an ounce of showmanship between them.  They are not Sunn O))) with the robes and the lights.  It's two regular people conjuring massive sound via small means.  It's just great to see it happen, for once.  I wasn't blown away.  It was what I expected.  The best part was sitting on top of one of the bass-heavy speakers right in front of the stage, Leah's rippling low end massaging my spine.   But then I couldn't really hear much else.  So I had to move around, and depending on where I stood, things sounded quite different.  

After the show I chatted with Aidan and Leah as their albums sold like hotcakes.  I was determined to find out if they drink alcohol.  For my review of Under the Jaguar Sun I was hoping their answer was "no" because that would explain how they output so much music.  You gotta be organized!  I got my answer when someone came up to Leah and asked if he could buy her a drink as part of a trade for an album.  She said "Sour Goose on the rocks" like a pro.  I inquired further, and Leah said "Yeah, we love to drink."  Laughs.  Oh, I think.  Not that I think less of you, but how am I going to spin my writing now??  Dammit!