There's a wonderful design that's been imprinted on the lemon yellow fan shirts of the Milagres (Portuguese for "Miracles") that captures my attention when I enter into the Bishop. It's of a wolf head, checkered into a thousand little grey and black Riemann sums, snarling at a wicked branch which has somehow lodged itself up and through the roof of its mouth. It's difficult to know what to take away from the wolf head, and yet the image invokes little to think about in terms of artistic axiom. Just lots of imagery to process.
With a bulk of stage instruments to process (banjo, keys, four types of guitars, customized drum set, etc) The Bloomington-hailing Natives thusly began the first of the two incredibly charismatic and talented performances of the evening. Comprised of five wide-grinning, easy-to-like lads in button-ups and etched-in concentration, the Natives promote the promulgation of "country and americana songs for the heart n soul." The fact that these are not only good-looking boys, paying their low-vocal homages to such American traditions as the lithe-legged girl "lovely as the night and day," the night out with the fellows, the good ole' days of 'Carolina, and the dad, but are also handy with every instrument they wield, from the (too liberally utilized) pedal steel guitar to the banjo, make them an easy bunch to swallow. Yet things dance upon the Mumford stratosphere perhaps a bit often, and the occasional too-doleful lyric ("it don't take much to crush a man's backbone") pervades with an unseemly heaviness for the fresh-faced youth. This however, is scrutiny that may be dismissed without so much as a flick of the hand. Grittily strong vocals matched the 'thump thump' of an equally strong bass drum, and with a climactically forte "Goddam!" for a performance wrap-up, the Natives took their smiling denouement.
I returned to the wolf t-shirt, and to the loitering Milagres, in an attempt to decipher whatever esotericism and musical conjunction the image held for the band's sound. When I addressed the drummer (newly Craigslisted), he shrugs with the reply that it just looks cool but that, in order for him to achieve the Milagres style, he was subjected to a Kubrickian eyelid peeler and brainwashed with the skewered wolf until his sound, more or less, clicked. The conversation then steered effortlessly into the concurrence of Buddhist and Celtic cultures as symbolized by my silver knot pendant. This was one way to make a good first impression.
The other way was through total sensory assault, something the Milagres understood to an art as they solemnly approached instruments, doused portentously in blue floodlight. The drums rattled, the guitars shivered, the vocals moaned, all in aching build that drew itself taut as a wire before it snapped into the wonderfully catchy "Here to Stay" from their September Album "Glowing Mouth."
"Lost in the dark, fading away" were the predominant lyrics that comprised much of the second track, and yet it could just have well served as an epithet to the musicians themselves. It's awkward and always a bit difficult to use a phrase such as "real artists" when the words are innately abstract, and yet there's little else that could be used to describe the artists of Milagres in their moment of sincere austerity, prone-faced completely to the waves of conjured sound. The complexity here arose considerably when the surreptitious singing instruments, succoring listeners into the intriguing atmospheric melancholia, met with the crowning vocals (sung in a beautiful, gnarled tenor) that served more as shouts of rebellion, raging against the dying of the light.
The pattern was something like pastiche and juxtaposition and the Milagres, whose sound is too diverse for even the artists to name, exceled in this sort of mix and match. They proffered a buyer's market of music: indie rock dabbed with angular sensitivity, new wave alternative with vocal crests lifted from Thomas Mars (Phoenix), blunt-force drama with cloud-scraping octave range and the earth pounding beats of a band like Muse, melodies teeming with easing diaphanousness that could be coming out of sources as strange as the video game Zelda or Kingdom Hearts. They not only had it all, but they knew what to do with it.
An outfit experienced enough to prolong their climax through three or even four tunes, the Milagres didn't let their final notes die without a tremendous fight. Their concerns, rather, were with constantly raising the vigorous ante. Just when vocalist Kyle Wilson had exhausted all possible sound barriers, he pocketed the volume within a murmur, clutching his guitar neck with two hands, quelling noise but upping intensity. In the last song, passion banked behind lips forced its way through in a successive climb of howling octaves, until the harmonics had ripped through whatever reservations still lingered in the atmosphere.
But it was a facade. There weren't ever any real reservations and Wilson was all cordial smiles after the show. His face hardly even shows a trace of the wolf he was a moment ago, howling away into the pale blue moon.
Post by Brandon Cook
