penfield | Maintain low tones

"One thing you can't predict is how loud people are going to want to be. For me it’s a practical thing: can the human ear access this information? Beyond a certain point you're just getting a lot of noise and rumble. To me I'd think you'd want people to have get the information transmitted. Though as a band, I think it is fun for people to feel the physical force of your music - big slabs of sound foisted at people's heads.

"But we don’t do that. The geometry of our music doesn't work in super-large venues - it sounds a lot of better in smaller venues where subtle gestures are intelligible. We used to freak people out when we played shows aggressively, hatefully quiet. Our band came out during the grunge era and the excess of sound, and we thought, this is just an American wide-load sensibility. Why don’t we turn the amps down and freak people out? We played a show with heavy metal bands and went on stage and won over the crowd. That’s a problem culturally - the idea that turning up is automatically somehow better."
- John McCrea (CAKE lead singer and troubadour), San Francisco Bay Guardian Interview, December 29, 2007

Not long ago J. and I took in an OK Go concert at the 9:30 Club. The band was great and it was fun and all, but I could not get over how incredibly, relentlessly loud it was. OK Go's power chords could have been used to shatter kidney stones.

I might have understood if the concert was held outdoors in the middle of a hurricane or taking place during an air raid drill, but in this instance there was absolutely no reason for that kind of amplification. What is going on? How have we come to the point where many audience members are forced to wear earplugs during a concert?

My speculation is that the cause is a combination of rock-n'-roll one-upmanship and the "louder is better" ethos that McCrea references, above. Maybe that's a reason CAKE concerts have always been my favorite concerts -- they rock you without inadvertently blowing your clothes off.

But now I've found (thanks to ERD's Sound Check) an even more modestly conducted musical act. The Two Man Gentleman Band advertises themselves as an "Uptempo, Original, Old-Time, Two-Man Music, at a Reasonable Volume."

Comprised of a banjo and upright bass, this duo provides comical bite-sized songs that revolve around one (and often more) of the following: joyful sweetness, double entendre, history, politics and math. The important thing is, it's catchy and it's funny. It's the kind of music I'd like to write, if only I had any instrumental ability, musical training or gift for melody, and if only I was a better writer, and if only I looked good in a bowler hat.

I offer the following examples of their Olde Worlde craftsmanship, all legally downloaded and suspiciously posted here for your downloading pleasure. I'll let you figure out which ones are secretly dirty. And if you're ever throwing me a surprise party, you should book these guys to play at it.

Heavy Petting (2008)

* William Howard Taft

* The Square Root of Two

* When Your Lips Are Playing My Kazoo

* Unicycle Blues

Great Calamities (2006)

* Stuff Your Ballot Box

* The War of Northern Aggression

* Prime Numbers

* Let's Make a Sandwich