By: Pat O'Brien
After a spare, loose set from local hot properties Duplomacy (see my review of last week’s show here), it was do or die time for NYC's +/-, a band that I had been back and forth about over the past few months. On record, some of it had been a little too emo for its (and my) own good, but in a live setting it took on a slightly more mature tone; there seemed to be much less whining than I had previously remembered. Instead, the music resembled emo’s off-his-meds, less predictable, significantly more fun older brother.
The band opened with crackles and pops that resembled an old phonograph, waking the crowd up a little with a clarinet that slowly seeped into near-croony off-balance emo-pop led by James Baluyut's soothing voice. They walked the razor-wire thin line between wearing their hearts on their sleeve and embodying Elliot Smith's soul-crushing despondency. The tension in many of the songs built but then never managed to purge itself by the end, creating a sense that the band had something bigger in mind other than putting a set list together of their best works to keep the roughly 65 fans satiated. To be sure, they made it clear they were there to entertain us, but it all seemed measured and well thought out, like they were building tension by degrees for something big later.
Nothing about +/- struck me as particularly groundbreaking (aside from the way their name looks on paper, which I find sort of clever), album-wise at least. Their last two albums, Let's Build A Fire and You Are Here are both better-than-average emo rockers, but in a live setting their music had an undeniable versatility. As the night wore on, the rhythm section began a slow leak of tension – something else not present on any of their recorded material. It was just tiny bursts at first, and nobody really acknowledged it, but you could feel it in the room. Something was going to happen.
Being the day after Thanksgiving, the band wanted to know if anyone had done anything special, and in particular if anyone had dined on the gastric A-bomb known as turducken (which, if you don’t know, is a chicken stuffed inside of a duck stuffed inside of a turkey). One concertgoer said he had, then rescinded his answer, then reinstated it. It is still unclear if he had actually eaten it or not but it wasn’t really important, I suppose. It made for a nice little detour and endeared the band to the crowd a little bit (or, at the very least, to this writer).
Then in one fell swoop (I’m still unsure of how exactly this transpired) they made a good-natured joke about the spelling of Duplomacy, comparing it to the giant-sized Legos called Duplos. (“If two children are playing with Duplos side by side without fighting, it’s called Duplomacy.”) The joke tanked but guitarist/keyboardist Patrick Ramos, in a move worthy of Johnny Carson, quickly made a bad joke funnier than a good one by playing canned laughter on his synth, causing the crowd to laugh, which somehow morphed into the crowd doing the wave. I merrily participated, enthralled by what was happening.
That tension still had to be purged, though. It loomed like a ghost you could see only in the corners of your sight, and after all that had happened, +/- built a two-song, slow-burning denouement to the night worthy of a veteran road band. The intermittent goofiness could have derailed the set but they had the crowd by its collective throat, and instead of squeezing the life out of us, they politely thanked us for coming and packed up their gear.
Photo by Steve Engelmeyer, aka Rock N Roll Star.
Location Info:
7th Street Entry
Artist Info: +/-
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