“You know you’re in The Submarines,” quipped vocalist Blake Hazard halfway through her band’s set, “when your husband corrects your posture in the middle of a guitar solo.” This relaxed and congenial tone framed the Submarine’s co-headlining show with The Morning Benders at The Black Cat’s intimate back-room second stage, and the lineup proved to be of the most elusive sort: legitimately cohesive. Both bands play accessible pop, but both also managed to turn their respective sets into something more.
Opener Dawn Landes, with her instantly likable alt-country songs and bright red cowgirl dress, unexpectedly charmed the socks off everyone I could see. She quickly got the room warmed up and dancing, thanking us for selling out the show even though it was a Sunday. She didn’t need to say anything;her music was so well-crafted and unimposing that I forgot the late hour mere minutes into her set.
As The Submarines moved around amps and pedals, the aforementioned Hazard set up something else: fake daisies fastened to mic stands, keyboards, and the drum set. It seemed an appropriate decoration for a band composed of a husband-wife duo. Hazard shared vocals with husband John Dragonetti and provided most of the energy, bounding around the stage with exuberance (and pigtails to match). The band shined brightest on more complex songs off their latest album, while their airy earlier material was occasionally too light to bear the weight of live performance.
When The Morning Benders took the stage, the room was primed for the jangly pop of their debut album, 2008’s Talking Through Tin Cans. What we got was something entirely different yet entirely satisfying. The youthful (none looked old enough to drink) four-piece from Berkeley, CA slowed down many of their songs, replacing tambourines with feedback and shedding the trappings of that mop-topped Liverpool group to which they are so frequently compared. The nervous immediacy of the album still managed to surface, particularly in frontman Christopher Chu, who spent half his time on tiptoes at the mic and the other half hunched over his guitar coaxing out noisy riffs. The lasting impression was of a band still finding its feet but thankfully with the confidence not to stop and analyze its progress. In this climate of perfectly-hip indie rock, sometimes the most refreshing thing is a band that ignored the memo about fun music not being cool anymore. Thankfully the Morning Benders did just that, and with plenty of substance to boot.
[Photo: Elzee]
