The show was packed with excellent pre-sales and a good crowd showed up for Helen Money who gave us a cello performe.
Here she's playing pizzicato - she's plucking. She used a loop to play back a rhythm/bass part and then played across the loop, occasionally plucking as in the picture, frequently playing with a bow as in this video:
Interesting sounds, not a typical approach to song structure in many ways but there's still a narrative happening on some level. The range and tone varies more from song to song than I would've expected based on the instrument, definitely some intensity a bit past 3 minutes in for example that I'm quite fond of.
Next up was Shellac and we had a full house.
They had two guitarists and a drummer and both guitarists sang on occasion, and occasionally nobody sang and they just played their instruments.
Shellac had a good powerful guitar oriented sound, but there was less infinite sustain than you typically get in this sort of power guitar music, so it had a different sound, almost towards the rockabilly end of the spectrum. Not really, more like a head feint in that direction, then off into a direction all their own. Lots of heavy guitar licks, power chords, odd timings, transitions or almost movements in their songs - Shellac structures the songs a little differently than mainstream approaches and I enjoy the different sounding and occasionally unexpected results.
Powerful thrashy stuff, sometimes funny, sometimes menacing, always interesting. I enjoyed the heck out of this show, glad I got a chance to catch Shellac.
