The Echo Curio at its best feels like a casual night playing foosball at your hip uncle’s house, except replace the weed and the no-spins rule with brown-bag tall boys and bands who got lost in the shuffle when you saw them at the Smell, but who now rule your life.  Or at least, they might do if you get there early enough to see them all.  I missed the entire howardAmb set Tuesday night because I was baking peppers.  Goddamn you, Isa Moskowitz!  Your faux cheese sauce from the Veganomicon is soooo good, and you made me take too long stuffing some into a couple pasilla peppers and tossing them in the oven.  In your defense, the way to this reviewer’s ears is through his stomach, and if I go out to see bands without chowing down first, I tend to describe their music as “devoid of substance.”
So I hustled like a white rabbit down to Echo Park, nutritional yeast dripping from my pensive lips, and arrived just in time to catch the weird jazz odyssey that was Capillary Action.  Actually, jazz is not the right word, but rock hardly works either, and calling them Zappa-esque, which is true, has been a dubious compliment ever since Dweezil joined Ringo Starr’s band.  But Capillary Action had old Zappa’s same love of stops and starts, changing moods and methods mid-song, and never letting you get comfortable with a consistent time signature.  This wasn’t Boingo spazz, but it was far too fun to be prog, and the line-up of accordion and trombone gave me the odd sensation that I was watching a post-ska Eighties band break it down in The Young Ones’ living room.  Or maybe it was Elvis Costello meets the Minutemen.  All I know is that one of their songs literally sounded like “Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny” without any of the tape manipulation.

Next was the band Headlight, basically a one-man project lead by Axel Enoc, a skinny little man with short hair and a stripey shirt and what looked like hospital EKG machines spread all over the floor under his keyboards.  Eddie and Sissy from the Polyamorous Affair had shown up just to see him, so I expected a treat.  Though the first song didn’t really deliver—it was a little too chill room for my tastes, especially following Capillary Action—by song two he started rocking out some songs he had written that very day, and we started seeing some more humanity in the keys and bleeps, not least of which because his girlfriend Ela, who looked like a four year old Russian child (god, what a cute couple!),  got up and started playing guitar.  “I’m really nervous, so learn to listen with your eyes closed,” Axel told us.  No need for the warning, buddy, as by song three, you were sampling yourself playing guitar on a bow, then adding a layer of great guitar picking on top of that, then back to the bow, creating a beautiful, delicate, moving soundscape.  Everybody automatically closed their eyes and shut the fuck up as you took us to an unexpectedly transcendent plane of emotion.  Your fourth and final song was a brave attempt at the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” accompanied by Korg effects and what sounded like a broken calliope.  It was kind of a letdown ending, but still better than Nico in the eighties.

Just as soon as Headlight started, he stopped, and we were all a little depressed that his set had lasted only four songs!  But then came 60 Watt Kid.
Electronic noise pioneer Terry Riley was fond of telling audiences in the seventies, “I do have a tape recorder up here, but there is nothing on the tape. I use it to create some of the loop effects that you will hear tonight. Everything you will hear me play will be live.”  60 Watt Kid’s trio of rockers are not noise experimentalists in the Riley sense, or even in the screamo/feedback sense that has become a second language for many bands.  But their brightly melancholic yawps into the void share something with Terry Riley’s live aesthetic that few electro-tinged bands can claim: an insistence upon constructing songs anew each time they’re performed.  A look upon the Echo Curio floor  revealed no laptops, yet where was that disembodied glockenspiel coming from?  They’d sampled their own strange chime-y noises on the spot, when we weren’t looking, like magicians.   Invisible jangly loops ensnared the crowd from the moment the first song’s bubbling softness jumped into its second, more rhythmic gear, and then promptly into fifth, as singer Kevin Litrow writhed, St. Vitus style, into the audience.

It’s hard to describe Litrow’s vocal style without saying “echo, echo, echo, echo, echo.”  His cavernous howls and moans warp into a dark cluster of incomprehensibility.  It’s harsh echo, like what Alan Vega from Suicide uses.  Yet if you put your cave ears on, you realize he’s addressing you directly, calling you out, or maybe calling upon a character you embody in the setting of that particular song.   He’s a bit reminiscent of a young David Byrne, back when he was more visceral and less World-ly.  But instead of Byrne’s detachment, with Litrow you get the sense that some real catharsis is going down.   Hell, the guy’s mom fucking died not too long ago, and yet here’s a song where he looks into the audience and yells “Hello, Mom?!?”  It wouldn’t have shocked me to hear her voice echoing back at him from the walls around us.

It was a commitment to the music shared by his band mates. Sometimes live it’s hard to catch how skilled of a guitar picker Derek Thomas is, but Tuesday his bright open-chord picking on a blue Fender Mustang made my brain go into sensory overload until the synapses popped and little spurts of truth pulsed out of every hair follicle in my body.  Drummer Dylan Wood, too, constructed his drum parts as densely as the strings, and banged his foot on the floor to make sure his ankle-rine chimed to match the pretty pickings going on in front of him.

Finally, a strange dude with a saxomophone came out and blasted through a tune that Kevin called “An American Standard!”  This was rock of the more basic kind, which 60 Watt Kid played ample portions of on their debut album but which normally doesn’t work its way too much into their live sets.  Good stuff, and fun!  Though the ghosts were still winding their way through the corners of the room, the bright light of good cheer was dead center, and we left beaming, our tall boys empty, and knowing grins upon our faces.

—Dan Collins