I don't go out to the Casbah very often on a school night, but that's when I get a chance to talk with other live music junkies without the weekend crowds. The first two groups I saw weren't very interesting, so I didn't bother shooting them. Besides, I was here to see the next band, Innerds.

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Bobby Bray from the Locust and Brandon Relf from Sleeping People are doing a new-ish math band, complete with the ubiquitous tapping and buried vocals that have become a signature of the style. Who would have thought that 80's metal technique combined with Bebop complexity would give birth to this.



Maybe Bebop isn't a very obvious influence, but I see many similarities between Math Rock and Bebop.

In the early 40's, the popular music heard on the radio was primarily jazz singers or jazz bands. People like Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, Lawrence Welk, and Billy Eckstine dominated the airwaves. Before the electric guitar changed everything, if you wanted to go out and hear some music, you'd take your lady out to the club to dance to a swing band. But there was a certain group of musicians who got bored playing the same tunes night after night, so they injected come complicated harmony and rhythms into the music they played in the after-hours clubsof NYC and Harlem, with nobody except other musicians as the audience.



As the music got more complex, it became tougher to dance to. Your average couple can't dance to the tempos that these tunes were played at, so it became more of a listening music than a dancing music. Some clubs started putting out chairs on the dance floor so that people could check out this new breed of music, onomonopoetically named Bebop, and the new breed of "hip cat" who played and spoke in a dense and insular language. These were the original hipsters.



I'm sure it doesn't take much effort to see how replacing a few words turns them into a desciption of math rock. At worst, it's complexity for complexity's sake. But when it's good, it can be like jumping through flaming hoops at 100 mph, thrilling and disorienting at the same time. I'm not saying that this is what Innerds sounds like, but that's the journey they're on.



I was going to shoot Upsilon Acrux, but their new twin guitar and drum lineup isn't as exciting as the last time I saw them. Gabriel Sundy pointed out to me that for the whole night, there was only one band that included a bass player, as one of my pet peeves is bass-less bands. I'd hate to think that my chosen instrument is falling out of favor in the progressive music realm, but once these guys want to shake some booties in the crowd again, that's when the bass will come back.