It's a different crowd at the Bishop on Wednesday night than usual. Instead of the ragtag pulled-together wardrobes of Tommy Hilfiger ties and combat boots; the speckled scarves and pullovers and short-slack-Sperrys trio, the audience sported an entirely new wardrobe of crinkled sleeve-pulled dress shirts with mauve ties, slacks, and rimmed Prada glasses. In response to perhaps the near-official end of winter or to the eclectic selection of performing bands (soloist E.A. Strother, indie-rock quintet Ziona Riley, and country/indie rock band The High Plains), the patrons of the Bishop brought with them both a welcoming attitude and a spring fashion.
The sound however, still seemed to linger with the aftertaste of winter with the opening vocals of E.A. Strother. Quavering impressively between highs and lows with a pure-but-not-too-pure sound that retained all natural aches and cracks, Strother's vocals were solid while her songs, a collection comprised mainly of tragic ballads, was rather bleak. Still, the selection's sounds migrated between easy listening and easier listening, Strother not crossing any varietal thresholds aside from an occasional whistle or hum. Nonetheless her music was stamped with an indelible sincerity, which, despite her statuesque posture and uncomfortable pre-tune dialogue, manifested itself in eyes that glistened remorsefully with each successive ballad.
Following an act that perhaps cooled the audience down more than it warmed them up, Ziona Riley and her four-piece country rock outfit ascended the stage teeming with confidence. Ziona smiled easily with her prominent Irish cheekbones, harmonizing abreast with her sister and fellow musician as she plucked at her guitar. It was this harmony that was the true backbone to their performance, and it saw its most beautiful delivery in the song "Holy Emotion," with the enchantingly optimistic lyrics "working class mother, working so hard, famous for love, all God's creation at heart," and a wavering, ethereal ambiance set by a bowed musical saw.
With Ziona dismounting, the High Plains began sound check almost as unassuming as they could be looking like a quintet of a post-D&D playing party members. They don't fit the young and preppy visage of standing-room-only-venue performers. There's no pre-show crowd-mingle, no pre-performance dialogue with the crowd. Their faces are focused almost to a grimace and their eyes bud wrinkles from squinting at details; they handle their instruments as formidably as weapons.
This professionalism saw a more adverse affect in their onstage rigidity, stiff backs and eyes deviating from face to face, for their first several songs of their just released album Our Devices. However this hardly seemed to matter as they gradually slipped into the lull that was so characteristically captivating of their sound. It was a sound marked by a wonderfully numbing incessancy of descending clarinet notes and a drip-drop lyrical quality that forced the words out slowly and articulately, almost as if by the sheer will of gravity.
There were occasions (as there always are) that could have called for better discretion. Over amplified basses drowned some of the beautiful harmony between Lead singer Nick Jeffries and secondary singer/clarinetist Rachel Glinis. After having worked hard through their first four tracks to induce an atmospheric placid beauty, the calm quite literally dissolved in the lyric of the following upbeat track: "the sun shown bright!" Like the pleasant chirp of the morning birds awakening the slumbering teenager, the cheerfulness wasn't the problem; it was merely the timing.
These, however are insignificancies in High Plain's delivery of Our Devices. One could listen to the album, which is available both in CD and cassette, for nothing more than this abstract respite and it would not be a bad way to experience the images of bucolic, windswept plains that they conjure. Yet if one chooses to lose himself, he risks missing all the delicate vocal delights, the soft zephyr motif of the clarinet, the lyrical ambivalence that sandwiches the bulk of the album between two apathetic tumults with hazy origins. There's more to be found under this simplistic veneer than pretty lullabies. The High Plains' true talent lies in giving their audience the music and then leaving them to dwell on how to take it.
Post by Brandon Cook
