Chavez @ Spaceland, 12/31/06

New York art rockers Chavez aren’t exactly yr archetypal party band, but I was still trying to live it up a bit at their New Year’s Eve L.A. show. As a result, I didn’t approach the show with the kind of, erm, rigor that would produce a proper show review. Playing Johnny Snapshot or Sammy Setlistgrabber stresses me out to much to make it a party. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

In this very space I’ve previously praised Chavez’ mix of the rock, the pop and the weird. Somehow along the way they built up an air of mystery for me–how did they do this?–that’s dispelled a little when four dudes in jeans and button-down shirts, variously shaggy and bleary-eyed, strap on instruments and take the stage. I say a little because I coulda spent the night just watching guitarist Clay Tarver and trying to figure out how those moves made those sounds come out of the amp.

So Tarver and bassist Scott Marshall seemed to be having a blast, while “the” James Lo, stoic, battered out heavy beats with eerily little sign of effort and singer/guitarist Matt Sweeney applied a vaguely grumpy intensity to his frontman duties.

Out of this, a 90s four-piece reformed for a month or so of transAmerican rocking, arose a sort of majesty. The men of Chavez have expertly honed the soft-loud dynamic into a complicated push and pull of tension and release. Indie rock of the 90s had a well-earned reputation for being kinda sexless–hell, there’s no roll in Chavez’ rock–but the play of anticipation and catharsis that’s a Chavez signature, worlds beyond the same-old “hit the stombox on the chorus,” made me think of sex. The really good kind.

Soft parts give way as monster drums kick in and stop abruptly. A second guitar blares away a dissonant lead punctuated with unbluesy bent notes. Now the drums are in for real, and it’s resolved to massive freedom rock chords. The bass waits a couple bars and before storming in to add heft and, yes, maybe, a groove.

And so on, every song a little puzzle, a sweaty wrestling match, an alternate-reality anthem. I guess, succinctly, Chavez fucking rocked. Not a bad way to start the new year.

(Because we like providing evidence of some type, below a couple of hilarious Chavez videos from ten years back or so.)

“Unreal Is Here”

Better Days Will Haunt You at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)

Chavez “Unreal Is Here” “You Faded”
Matt Sweeney & Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy “What Are You?”

Chavez is one of my favorite rock bands, and I belive that they’ve long deserved a revival of interest in their music. So yesterday I was unbelievably psyched to learn that Matador Records is reissuing the entire Chavez catalog next week as a 2-CD+DVD set called Better Days Will Haunt You.

I feel like the band was underappreciated in their time because they were sort of neither fish nor fowl–a unique mixture of the out, the pop and pure Neanderthal power. They rocked loud and hard. They built their songs around complicated guitar interplay to drop even math rock jaws. They embellished those songs with noise and dissonance. They sang catchy melodies, and weren’t afraid to sing softly or well.

Chavez’s second and final full-length, Ride the Fader, has been my catharsis of choice for most of this milennium so far. Sometimes it feels like it was designed by scientists to be pinned at speaker- and ear-damaging volumes on a car stereo while the driver shouts along.

Not to bait-and-switch you, but I’ve presented “Unreal Is Here” off of Ride the Fader. I’m told it was the band’s credibility-shaking power ballad. But before I rediscovered Ride the Fader c. 1998, it was the melody I couldn’t place that was stuck in my head on and off for roughly a year.

I’m a sucker for non-cliché affirmations, so the entire bent of the song, and particularly the line “There is nothing to not be amazed at,” give me the happy hopeful. I’m also easily moved by the quiet-to-loud thing, or at least used to be, so the full band ante-upping at 1:12, and then the clang and mantra around 1:33… well, I might’ve scared people whilst pumping (and screaming along with) this one in the subcompact.

“You Faded,” off the out-of-print (for another week!) Pentagram Ring EP, hopefully hews closer to my description of Chavez’s m.o. Like a lot of their Gone Glimmering-era stuff, it puts me in mind of glam rock, but that just might be a trick of alliteration and free association. It’s less epic and weird than they’d get on RtF, but it’s still pretty fucking epic and weird, and hooky.

(You can compare these original versions to the remastered tracks from Better Days, available for download at Matador’s site.)

I’ve been only hazily aware of post-Chavez projects. Google/imdb tells me that guitarist Clay Tarver was involved with the UCB television show and co-wrote with TV uber-producer JJ Abrams a mediocre exploitation/horror movie starring modern acting genius Steve Zahn. Frontman Matt Sweeney did time with Billy Pumpkin’s Zwan–the less said about that disaster the better–and last year collaborated with cracked country auteur Will Oldham in his Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie guise to make Superwolf, a record notably prescient in its lupine name.

I haven’t fully unpacked “What Are You?,” on which Sweeney tackles Oldham’s lyrics. Pretty, bluesless fingerpicking provides the backdrop for a prolonged accusation in the POV of a woman locked in some sort of sadomasochistic power play with an abusive lover. Of course, it’s hard to be surprised by psychosexually twisted subject matter coming from Oldham. A recommended listen for those who don’t mind being unsettled.

I guess it’s just nice to hear Sweeney back in the game.

Better Days Will Haunt You on Amazon.
Superwolf at Circuit City.