By: Charlie Vaughan
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Photo by Dave Markley
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The Varsity Theater was built to handle a large crowd, but the sheer volume of empty space when I stood at the foot of main floor was hard to ignore. It was an uncomfortable situation. Occasional bits of broken conversation were echoing off the high ceiling with subdued music barely coming out of the many speakers. A thin silhouette was assembling a drum kit on the stage riser. This is an exact quote from my notebook, “Theater incredibly empty. 23 people right now. Mood is terminal. Similar to watching your wallet sink into a dirty toilet. Bands may be stalling.”
Economy Team, who were not listed on the theater marquee, played to a handful of young fans that seemed to know the members personally. The third three-piece band on the bill, they seemed a bit lost on the Varsity’s big stage. Although they were electric and distorted, their sound was too small to fill the sprawling emptiness. The guitarist was a hair tentative, but he had a surprisingly strong voice.
Next up was The Future. The most obvious thing about the band was the drummer. A small bespectacled, unimposing figure as he walked through the venue, he became a giant menace the second he got behind his kit. He hammered the drums like a 400-pound gorilla gone crazy on cocaine and wild moonshine. This de facto front man was singularly worth the price of admission. His drums thundered through the Varsity and rattled the lampshades.
As a band, The Future was at their best when they were building momentum. The arrangements of their songs incorporated several changes leading down a winding path that got wider the further it unfurled. The songs featured a lone guitarist using a series of stuttering riffs to push the listener forward. A few well-placed pauses served to announce a sudden turn in the path while the scowling bassist rammed his parts down the shoulder of the road like a bulldozer, but too often, the payoff at the song’s peak was a loud, jangled mess.
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Bridge Club - Photo by Dave Markley
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When the decks were cleared, I made my way down to the stage floor. Bridge Club was running cords into amplifiers and tightening wing nuts on symbol stands. They lined up three abreast, with the drums up front in the middle, and effectively cut the stage down to a more intimate size – a shrewd decision. Joe Werner is Bridge Club’s principal songwriter and vocalist and their sole guitarist. The band is essentially an extension of Werner. He is straight out of the front man mold – tall, lean, strikingly angular, standoffish – and he is adept at handling the role
Bill Rammer and Mike Koch comprised the rhythm section – the band’s muscle. The bassline in Bridge Club’s songs did not just tug along with the drums; the bass was played. The notes drifted up and down the fretboard with a purpose and style not often seen with other rock bassists. Its beauty was in its compensation for the lack of a second guitar. The bassline is the melody you remembered long after the song had ended.
Koch, who also plays in the Black Hearted Forrest, was always precise, never sloppy, and played with a reserved confidence familiar to military personnel.
Bridge Club’s music has been widely characterized locally as “garage rock.” This is a backhanded description, of sorts. What they play is straight-ahead rock songs, catapulted with searing guitar and galloping drums. The structures are deceptively simple, but never common. It comes together on a rock and roll platform and is presented forthrightly as just that—rock and roll. Honest and Honorable.
Bridge Club managed to find some momentum a few songs into their set. It was the mark of professionals. “Don’t Pretend,” from their first full length album Summer of the Jackal, fell into its swaggering charm and fueled the blistering “From Out the Furnace” which followed. The songs came off sharply, sounding well defined on the Varsity’s sound system. The vocals were clean, never muddled with the guitar and bass noise, something which often happens because Bridge Club plays iron-bending loud. The songs started to swell, they climbed up into the colored fabric swashes swooping across the ceiling, cresting high above the tight band and then crashed down like a wave on some desolate beach.
Toward the end, Joe Werner, in a silver voice, summed up the whole night supremely in the song “The Scene,” off this year’s release, The Scorched Capsule.
This scene is dumb,
I think we’re done.
It’s time to start over…
over again
A few minutes later they were done, quietly turning off the amplifiers and breaking down their gear. There was one man recording the show on a hand held video camera from in front of the stage, and if framed correctly, the tape won’t show the lackluster crowd standing idly in anticipation of the end. It will capture the band alone, grinding away under the stunning stage lights. I bet it’s a damn fine tape.
Location Info:
The Varsity Theater
Artist Info: Bridge Club, Death to Our Enemies, Economy Team, The Future
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