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Songbyrd and UN Booking Presents Cola - The Gloss Tour
Devon Welsh and Prude
Monday July 15, 2024
Doors - 7:00 PM
Show - 8:00 PM
Tickets
Advance - $16
Day of - $18
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From their inception Cola have expanded on the d.i.y. ethic of the Dischord and SST eras, creating potent sounds from a minimal palette of drums/bass/guitar and lacing their songs with winsome one-liners and societal commentary. What’s another word for commentary? Gloss, apparently. Never basic, the lyrics reward repeated listening for deeper meanings. David Berman’s poetry-via-garage light pennings are an inspiration, as equally so are the lighter side of UK first-wave New Wave and the Dunedin sound. The results are in the pudding: at times sparse and poetic, at others a thrilling, hook-laden good time, as with the cheeky romantic sketch of a one-night stand that is so overflowing with innuendo-cum-journalism talk that it almost teeters over into self-parody. It's an album bursting with energy and wit and ideas–filled to the margins.
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Explosions and sirens boomed and whined in the distance. We were listening to Devon Welsh's new album, Come With Me If You Want To Live. Against all odds, Welsh's career had gradually given him pop stardom—the kind that would have once accommodated perfume brands in your name, or let your hologram play festivals after you died. But as his star rose, so did his infamy. Welsh had called the record a revolt against the state of music. We were on the run because the government classified his album as a threat.
The music was poppy but stark, built around dark, quick, synthetic beats, piercing instrumental melodies that often receded into the shadows of choruses, and the occasional double-tracked vocal or acoustic guitar strum. It barely passed the automated musical censors. The lyrics subtly excoriated societal systems, magnified close relationships, reckoned with the costs of fame, and generally said what people were thinking but afraid to say. “Best Laid Plans” and “Twenty Seven,” I observed, contained poignant allusions to Welsh's earlier career (a charge Welsh nonetheless denied, moving his body from side to side as if to shake his head, a movement he struggled to execute, so big were his traps).
I found comfort in its austerity. With such high stakes and so few critics left alive, it was fitting. Welsh gave me his veinous, ultra-muscular hand, just as he had when we’d met for our interview earlier that afternoon: What are you waiting for? No time. Get in. Trust me.
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People in my life / so beautiful — none of them have the right to be alone," goes the one-two punch in the chorus of Prude's "Cowboy Beatdown," songwriter Nick Bairatchnyi's signature rasp catching around a minor chord as he pleads. "When I call / pick up the phone," he demands, and the instrumentation pummels home this insistence. The single is a shoulder-shaking reintroduction to the DC rock band and the first hint of a full-length record to follow. The song sounds desperate, and for good reason — why should we accept the status quo of allowing ourselves to casually grow apart from the people that sustain us? Prude asks, maintains eye contact, and asks again. Nick Bairatchnyi has long practiced a habit of examining connection in song — the longing for it, the obstacles to it, the surprising shapes it takes — initially forging his insight in beloved indie-pop act The Obsessives, a project formed while Bairatchnyi was just in high school. Even then, his poignant ability to capture the space between individuals was clear — no matter how saccharine their hooks, Bairatchnyi's pathos always grounded the band's emotional palette. The founding of Prude marks a return to Bairatchnyi's native DC — the outfit consists of his childhood friends in Ray Brown (drums) and Alex Bass (bass / mixing / engineering), both also of Snail Mail — but their sound is undeniably inflected by an early adulthood stint in Philadelphia, a city where the form and function of songs are twisted into brilliant, novel results in basements any night of the week. But while some use abstraction to affect distance, Bairatchnyi and his collaborators wield their schooling in it to name the degrees that separate us from one another. "Now I'm part of you and you're part of me," he sings, rivulets of feedback and distortion coursing around him. "Let's close the door and obliterate the mystery.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Songbyrd Music House, 1-3, Penn St NE, Washington, DC 20002, United States,Washington D.C.
Tickets
