Hugs Abound at 21 Grand

Jason Andersen encouraged the audience to hug him at the end of his performance, on November 2nd at 21 Grand in Oakland. "CDs are ten dollars, hugs are free," he said. And this a little known fact—the quality of a musician’s hug actually provides great insight into their other, more explicitly musical, expressions. Or at least, such was the case for the three acts at the Mount Eerie/Curtains show last Thursday night.

Jason Andersen is like a maniacal cast-off from early drafts of the musical Rent. And this is a good thing. 21 Grand is a small warehouse art gallery and there was a sort of reservation and calculation present in the sizable audience prior to Andersen’s performance. This was immediately dissipated when Andersen burst into action.

So you have to picture this. Andersen is wearing a sort of hobo train conductor hat and a grungy Garfield T-shirt that looks like it’s nearly worn through in all places. The armpits are stained yellow. One minute it looks like he’s noodling on his guitar in the corner, and the next he’s pacing across the floor—not the makeshift stage—and percussively strumming his guitar, and he’s yelping, without any guitar pickup or microphone to sing into. Now, these yelps—they’re only sometimes in the form of traditional singing. Nearly as often, Andersen skittishly preaches to the dumbfounded audience about the truth and joyful intricacies of the ordinary, and about these tremendously common, teenaged experiences that caused everyone in the audience to smile in recognition. Andersen is smart and funny and writes songs that reflect those qualities, and he sings loudly and desperately, spittle flying from his lips, about friendship and rebellion and falling in love with girls and life with tremendous specificity. Picture the Mountain Goats but psychotic.

His albums don’t sound like his live performance, however. They don’t produce the same blushes, rushes, and associations. He is, however, an excellent, prolonged hugger.

Chris Cohen is in the Curtains. He was in Deerhoof, but that detail should begin to matter less and less in descriptions of the music he is making now—which is quietly strange and careful. Sometimes it gets described as cute, which is how it can seem initially but not exclusively—because a strange thing happens, especially in songs such as "Get Lucky," when momentum is accrued by the unpredictability of the melodies and a gasping weight is invoked. The Curtains perpetrated a specific, warm atmosphere, a cousin to nostalgia but something quieter and more functional. They played an excellent set, and gave the best hugs of the night.

Phil Elverum sometimes makes music under the moniker of Microphones, which is often compared to Neutral Milk Hotel. But the music he performed at 21 Grand was gloomy, loud, punk-influenced rock with staggering tempos. There is a kind of music that teenagers across America make in band practice rooms that smell like marijuana and sweat—frustrated, homespun and distorted, sometimes poppy, sometimes sad. Mount Eerie sounded like that except very technically proficient.

And there was this one incredibly beautiful moment when Elverum stopped flinging his duct-taped guitar about and finger-picked a quiet song with a descending bass-line about feeling the wind rush through his clothing.

After whispering into the microphone in a nearly destroyed voice for about two minutes, he looked to his band mates (a wild Scandinavian drummer and Jason Andersen, who joined Elverum onstage in what appeared to be a drastically altered, severe alter-ego) and the music exploded into cacophony. Enjoyment of Mount Eerie’s set at 21 Grand depended on a listener’s appreciation of sharp, heavy distortion. Oftentimes it felt like there wasn’t much inside the static.

Also, Elverum’s doesn’t lift his arms when he hugs; he keeps them at his sides, and waits for it to be over.

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