Words by Brendan
with photos by Paul McKenney

I’ve liked The Raveonettes for a while + I recently got into Tamaryn + I wrote two posts about them for this here website + They embarked on tour together + They were stopping in Washington, D.C. on a Sunday night + The Megabus has a newish route from Pgh to D.C. = My friend and I making a 24-hour round-trip excursion to D.C. to see an awesome concert. This is the farthest I’ve traveled to see a show, by far, in my concert-going career and, given the quick turnaround, it will likely hold the record for the ratio R=(miles traveled)/(total time spent) for a long time. But it was totally worth it! Sorry, I got kinda mathy there. Read on for some more musical stuff, stream some tunes, and forget I used any + and = signs at all.

Tamaryn / The Waves
Tamaryn / Sandstone
The Raveonettes / Aly, Walk With Me
The Raveonettes / Forget That You’re Young

The nice thing about this show is that, in addition to the amazing music I heard, I’ll forever associate the experience with some fun travel and sightseeing. I had just visited D.C. over New Year’s, in fact; I walked around, visited some museums, bought some records, did karaoke at 3:00 am, etc. This time, my friend Paul (whose Raveonettes photos you see here) and I got into town around noon, sat at a coffee shop with a college buddy of mine for a couple hours chatting about math, grabbed some delicious bagels at a hole in the wall, then wandered around the National Mall area. We took pictures of the Capitol building and the Washington monument in the distance, and I took pictures of two separate groups of people who were competing in a city-wide scavenger hunt. We stumbled upon a Shakespeare festival. We walked through the National Botanic Garden and saw lots of pretty plants. We walked through the National Gallery of Art and saw some cool sculptures and paintings. We staged a silly meta-photo of Magritte’s La condition humaine. We ate delicious Ethiopian food at a hole in the wall. We went to a frozen yogurt shop and played a rousing game of Tecmo Bowl. And then it was show time!

We got to the Black Cat around 7:30 for an 8:00 show since we already had tickets; good thing we did, because there was actually a line out the door. As we waited, we glanced over the “upcoming shows” schedule on the door and grew jealous of larger cities’ concert draws. Then we were inside and upstairs and staking out a good spot to stand and lean (since we still had our backpacks full of luggage with us) remembering that we were there to see two great bands. It was allegedly a sold-out show, and it was pretty crowded by the time The Raveonettes took the stage, but for Tamaryn‘s set, it didn’t seem much more than 2/3 full, which was kinda nice and comfortable for us, though. We were close enough to the stage to see the band members doing their thing but far enough from the amps that the sound quality was perfect. I actually Tweeted something about how “infuckingcredible” Tamaryn sounded in this huge, boxy, low-ceilinged and dim room (their sound engineer must be a serious pro) and the band retweeted it. How ’bout that! They do sound amazing on record, with the shoegazy guitar melodies and the atmospheric vocals and the forcefully-restrained percussion and … it’s all perfectly mixed. I was rather impressed with how well that sound held up live. The guitarist stayed on one side of the stage, always bent forward with his long hair hanging loosely over his face, whammy bar strapped to a bracelet to keep it moving on every strum. I think he looked up at the beginning of each song to make sure they started on time but, after that, he was lost in his guitar, and I was lost in his melodies washing over the crowd like … well, sound waves. The bassist, as well, kept her hair hiding her face for most of the show, but I saw her more clearly later on when she was standing up in the DJ booth between sets. The drummer was the only one with trimmed locks, but he was obscured by the others’ shadows cast by the various colored lights pointing towards the stage. The singer, and the band’s eponym, was front and center on stage but, despite that prominent position, she felt the most hidden and out of reach from the crowd. I can’t remember a single word spoken by her that wasn’t a song lyric—no banter, no “thanks for coming out”, no song intros—and seeing her peer out from behind her flowing, dark hair while singing cryptically about oceans and wind and sand and flowers and what have you was not making her any more “visible”, so to speak. Basically, what I’m saying is that the visual components of this show wholly matched the aura of the music and totally confirmed my love for this band. The guitarist rocking back and forth to squeeze out the descending, high-pitched melody during the bridge of “Sandstone” while the drummer rolls his head back and stares upward and the singer stares out over the crowd as if she’s singing to a vision—that’s a mental/sonic image I’ll keep with me for a loooong time. They played a bunch of songs from their debut, The Waves, plus a song or two from some older EPs, and eventually they finished and left the stage to enthusiastic applause. I checked my phone and realized they had played for no more than 35 minutes. It felt like two hours, but it wasn’t nearly enough.

There was a slight delay to change equipment on stage, but soon enough The Raveonettes emerged from backstage and waved to an appreciative, enthusiastic, sell-out crowd. I was immediately struck by how … I dunno, fashionable they looked. All four of them were wearing all black, and with Sharin Foo’s alarmingly blonde hair and Sune Rose Wagner’s buoyant boisterousness, they struck quite a presence. I say “four of them” because there were two gentlemen accompanying Sharin and Sune (the main duo of the band) onstage. These two fellows bounced back and forth between drumkits and keyboards/synthesizers and guitars throughout the set, standing the entire time, filling in the sonic gaps between Sharin’s bass and Sune’s guitar and their combined vocals. I say “gaps” because I imagine that, between the two of them, they wouldn’t be able to achieve the complexity and fullness of sound that they attain on record, but, to be entirely honest, the sound was so amazingly full at this show that I can’t really attribute any particular achievement to any one band member. Every song sounded entirely rich and … almost aggressive, but in an entirely appropriate way. They played a bunch of songs from their earlier albums, including a handful off Lust Lust Lust (I swear I will write a New Classic on that album sometime soon because I fucking love it) and a few I recognized from Pretty In Black. For instance, they played the smooth jam “Lust” and I was amazed at how powerful it was to see live; it usually occupies this place in my mind between the upbeat dance-rockers “Hallucinations” and “Dead Sounds” on the album, but on this particular night, it existed of its own accord and shone bright like a supernova: the jangly guitar from Sune was laced with reverb and the pounding percussion from the two fine fellows on the sides of the stage was consistently insistent, and combined with Sharin’s vocal harmonies, everything was just perfect. They also played a song or two from In And Out Of Control (at least “Last Dance”, I think?) and a few in a row from their latest LP, Raven In The Grave.

One of the more compelling elements of the concert was the engaging and appropriately-timed light show. I didn’t expect it to be such an integral component of the experience, but they had clearly put some significant thought into it. Watching the pulsing, bright red lights match the pounding throb of the drums during some particularly loud and dancey moments of their songs was pretty darn cool, I gotta say. At times, it was almost blinding, and at other times, the strobes were almost oppressive, but that may just be because I’m not used to these kinds of hyped-up dance-rock shows. The crowd that night was enjoying it all, with a fair amount of dancing going on in the section in front of us near the stage, and some whoops and hollers from behind us at the beginnings of songs as folks recognized the upcoming tunes. Personally, I was glad to see them play some of my favorites, including “Love In A Trashcan”, but the best part of all was the two-song encore. After an almost hour-long set of their signature grungy pop-rock, The Raveonettes came back out to rousing applause and smothered us with two more songs of reverby goodness. First, they played the standout single “Forget That You’re Young” from their latest album, which was an interesting choice of song to put off for an encore, considering how mellow it is, relative to the rest of their catalog, but sobeit—I thoroughly enjoyed this live rendition, for which the audience was apporpiately and politely attentive. Second, they closed the show with an outstanding version of my all-time favorite song of theirs, “Aly, Walk With Me”. The lovely and emotive vocals, balanced with the seriously hard-rockin’ guitar solos that sound like a buzzsaw passing through a woodchipper at just the right frequency to make it all sound melodious, make for an epically awesome song, in general, and they pulled it all off (and then some) in front of us lucky concertgoers. It was an amazing conclusion for an amazing concert, and it made the whole trip worthwhile, for sure. Okay, duh, it was already worthwhile, but this really solidified that fact.

The Raveonettes were looking pretty in black, as always, and Tamaryn had me riding the waves in all the right ways. I award this show eight out of nine black cat lives, plus four cups of diner coffee and one D.C. sunrise.

The Raveonettes on the web: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Insound
Tamaryn on the web: Facebook / Twitter / Insound

Filed under: Concert Reviews, Live Music