Longwave
Life of the Party
December 14, 2004
# 6
Even at only 5 songs and 15 minutes in length, Longwave’s 2004 EP release, Life of the Party, is a wondrous space rock jaunt through modern post-punk by perhaps the most unpredictable band of the last few years. You probably won’t hear Longwave on the radio (yet), but if this mini-album is any indication, 2005 may turn out to be the band’s biggest commercial year yet.
My introduction to Longwave began, as do our most exciting flirtations, by accident. The story begins not at the Bowery in Manhattan, Longwave’s home away from home (they are from Rochester originally), but curiously, 4,000 miles away in Washington state. After spending nine months in Seattle during 2001 trying to figure out how grunge became the phenomenon it did (among other things), I returned to the east coast at the end of that year hoping to gain perspective on September 11th and perhaps figure out a little better just how everything in the world fit together. It was a lot to ask from relocation, but deep down inside, I was sure that things, although in many ways changed for the worse, would result in many, many changes for the better. The musical landscape was one such casualty of the latter changes for the better.
While bumming around my parents’ Bricktown, New Jersey home for the month of November, I had quite a bit of time on my hands. One day, while flipping through the channels on television, a certain video halted me dead in my New Balance: The Stokes’ Last Night. The video was so simple (just the band on an empty studio stage, walking around in a daze, cymbals falling to the ground, hair all a muss, clothes much too tight), yet so effective, somehow, in portraying just what I was feeling myself at the time. “Who the hell are these guys and where the fuck did they come from?” I shouted, to no one in particular. Sooner rather than later, all the details would crystallize before my eyes as New York City’s most spoiled, adored, and reviled band of the last ten years or more would take the music world by storm, ushering in what has commonly been referred to as “the garage rock revival.” Everyone from The White Stripes to The Vines to The Yeah Yeah Yeahs was suddenly stars, and lo-fi, back to basics rock and roll in the spirit of The Velvet Underground was reborn.
Fast forward a couple months, and I was back in Boston for Version 2.0 of my Massachusetts Odyssey, which is still continuing to this day. Once here, I made a promise to myself to get out and do more with my time, see more, and get everything I could out of my second run through Beantown. No stone would be left unturned and no opportunity left unseized.
So it was with that mentality, one afternoon while perusing the Boston Phoenix, that I noticed Nada Surf would be playing The Middle East Upstairs, one of the smaller venues in town. “Wow,” I surmised, “this could be a fun show. At the very least, I’ll get to hear Popular, so what do I have to lose?” Before the day was out, my tickets were purchased, and shortly thereafter, before I knew it, it was the night of the show. I was pumped!
Things started out on a fun note with local band Dragstrip Courage, which featured Scott Janovitz, brother of Buffalo Tom frontman Bill Janovitz. It was a good set, and curiously, the next time I would see Scott would be standing in the crowd at the Matt Sharp/Goldenboy concert at T.T. the Bear’s some 2 ½ years later. Ahhh, it was good to be back in Boston. But little did I know, that night Dragstrip Courage was to be most sane part of the evening, and things were immediately about to get a whole lot stranger.
With the lights dimmed and the house music turned off, Longwave was the next band on stage. The audience waited and the band members futzed around with their equipment. There seemed to be some arguing, members with other members, members with sound guys, members with their instruments. It was surely a sight to behold. Then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, guitarist Shannon Ferguson threw his guitar down in disgust and stormed off the stage. The audience, and I in particular, was perplexed. “Just who the hell are these guys and where the fuck did they come from?” I mused, recalling vividly the last time I had such thoughts. Lead singer and guitarist Steve Schlitz soon stepped up, and attempted to bring the audience up to speed with some comment about always having problems at The Middle East. OK. Then, from whence he had disappeared, Ferguson returned, and the band kicked into some noise rock the likes of which I had never heard before. Sounds were coming from everywhere and yet nowhere that I could accurately pinpoint. The feedback was wild and completely unorthodox, yet, somehow, easily harnassed. But by who? And how? As their set wound down, Ferguson brought out a voice modulator and screamed into the thing as his guitar turned the sounds into unidentifiable feedback. Meanwhile, Schlitz kept himself occupied by trashing the stage, knocking guitars and amps to the ground in a vigorous tirade. By then end, the band finally gave up punishing their instruments and stormed away, noises still reverberating throughout the place. It was awesome.
That night, I would forgive Nada Surf for not playing Popular. Their set was great and reaffirmed my intuition that they got the fuzzy end of the grunge lollipop. They were indeed more than one hit wonders, and now I could rest assured knowing that I was right all along. But the big score of the night was the stunning Longwave performance that began with confusion and ended with me in a state of utter awe, something I will never, ever forget, and a performance that continues to rank near the top of my list of the best shows I have ever attended.
Now, I suppose, I have returned full circle, still continuing my search for the next big thing, but content with Longwave as the life of the party. This new EP finds the band experimenting with distorted vocals and synth drones on Life of the Party, speeding up the tempo way past grunge on We’re Not Gonna Crack, turning up the fuzz on Here It Comes, reaching to the stars on the contemplative, soothing instrumental Sunday Nite Health, and holding the whole thing together is There’s a Fire, an acoustic ballad that proves there is little this band can not do to near perfection. Longwave may not be reinventing the wheel with this EP, but this is yet another artifact of a band that continues to excite with their energy and unpredictability, two of the characteristics I find most exciting in my rock and roll. The band has been in the studio the past several months, or so I hear, but I can hardly imagine what might be in store from this unorthodox and unpredictable unit for 2005. But when it comes to Longwave, I am certain of two things: it will undoubtedly be well worth my time and definitely filled with lots of surprises.