The Rakes with Every Move a Picture, Red Fox Grey Fox at The Varsity Theater on 7/11/06

By: Pat O'Brien

Every Move A Picture - Photo by Steve Engelmayer

“Thanks for coming out to a rock show and listening to some sap,” Red Fox Grey Fox’s lead singer Pete Miller said near the end of their set; while he was being a little self-conscious and self-deprecating, he was in the right neighborhood. They were undeniably sweet but they carried some weighty emotional baggage with them, and Miller’s pained falsetto made it seem he could cry at any moment, like that kid in high school who yearned to date the prom queen but knew he never could and wrote songs about it instead. That’s oversimplifying their music a bit, which I can only describe as “balladeering.” I’ll admit, I didn’t want to like their soft, measured, piano-filled epic pop but I was won over despite it all, and the small bursts of jangly power pop were an nice touch to the set. They seemed to be trying to bridge the yawning chasm that lies between Sigur Ros and Sunny Day Real Estate, and were doing a fairly good job at it to boot.

San Francisco’s Every Move A Picture were up next, waving their Pink Flag with their angular riffs and big, shiny chunks of Solid Gold tossed in for good measure. If your missing my meaning here, I guess you can blame it on Rio. Ok, enough of that. They sounded like a frothy mixture of the Class Of ‘77 punks and early 80s disco-pop. Think The Killers with better riffs and minus the silly synth flourishes. The lyrics were fairly politically charged (“Dixie,” in particular, which was an indictment of FEMA and the country’s response to Hurricane Katrina), but never sounded overly preachy or heavy-handed. Were they particularly inventive or special? In a word, no. But they were immensely enjoyable to watch, and a cover of T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy” was one of the best I’ve heard in recent memory.

The Rakes' finale - Photo by Steve Engelmayer

Full disclosure here: I am smitten with The Rakes. Those prickly, buzzsaw guitars and songs with candidness and immediacy rivaling Art Brut are just what I have been looking for lately. Played live all of those things were magnified tenfold; it was intoxicating. The songs are meaningful in their meaninglessness. “Strasbourg,” for example takes place in 1983, when most of this band were in diapers, I’d imagine, but captures Cold War paranoia perfectly, somehow, even though the song is really about time travel. Or is it both? Or neither? That’s the gift (and, by the gift’s own nature, the rub), the songs are about everything and nothing all at once; the band has created it’s own sense of pop culture and it’s own frame of reference for that pop culture.

The set was scorching despite the minor amp glitch for lead guitarist Matthew Swinnerton during the opener, “22 Grand Job,” but they made up for it at the end (more on that later). Lead singer Alan Donohoe joked throughout the set (“Our apologies to the ladies, that song was positively filthy,” he quipped after the F-bomb-filled “The Guilt”) and danced around in a way that seemed to be a mix of Ian Curtis, a robot, and a girl from a 50 Cent video. They played a couple of new songs from their upcoming self-described “difficult follow-up album,” which sounded like a nice step forward from their current Capture/Release. All in all it was a nice mix of current and new songs, with a B-side or two in the mix as well. The thing that really stood out was the speed at which they played, like they were all trying to keep up with the song that they were playing. It was as if the music had a life of it’s own and was starting to get out of the band’s control, and I half-expected to see smoke emanating from Swinnerton’s fingertips at the end of “T-Bone,” but no such luck.

At the end The Rakes did something I have never, ever, in all my years seeing live shows, seen before. I mentioned the flubbing of the opening song, but, while most bands just discard the song from the setlist and move on, The Rakes played the last song on the setlist and then went back and played “22 Grand Job” in it’s entirety again; Donohoe remarked, “Well, you paid for the song, I suppose, didn’t you?” The crowd rushed the stage to dance with the band at this point, another “you’ll never see this again” moment as not even one security person rushed to remove anyone. We had paid for those songs, but they could have played until next Sunday and nobody would have had nearly enough.

Every Move A Picture Setlist:

Chemical Burns
Mission Bell
12AM
Love And Secession
Dixie
St. John’s Night
Outlaw
20th Century Boy
Signs Of Life

The Rakes Setlist:

22 Grand Job
We Are All Animals
Down With Moonlight (new)
Work Work Work (Pub Club Sleep)
I’m On A Mission (new)
The Guilt
T-Bone
Open Book
Dark Clouds
Terror!
Violent
Ausland Mission (b-side)
Retreat
All Too Human
The World Was A Mess (new)
Strasbourg
22 Grand Job

Location Info: The Varsity Theater
Artist Info: Every Move a Picture, Red Fox Grey Fox, The Rakes (UK)

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