Music for Misanthropes

by Katie

My senior year of high school, I was really into Maroon 5. That’s about when “Songs About Jane” peaked, shortly before the radio was beaten into a coma by squeals promising that “She Will Be Loved” for an entire f*%&ing summer, and long before whatever the hell they’ve most recently forced on us that is not good. That album was a big influence on the end of my emo phase, and the beginning of my love affair with unabashed pop music. Then Adam Levine got all smarmy, their songs got whirled through a blender with some human feces, and so fizzled the possibility of decent mainstream pop-funk.

What does this have to do with DC9 on Thursday night? It seems to me that, luckily for us, The XYZ Affair have taken up the mantle of funky pop music, plus a bit of theatricality, and absent the smug “Everyone wants to f*ck me” attitude.

A typical XYZ Affair song contains some or all of the following elements: literary references, a stick-in-your-head chorus, wry reflections on a middle-class upbringing, what Pandora would call “dynamic male vocals,” guitar shredding, and a little bit of bombast. Their lyrics are sharp and highly literate, and the music is colored by jazz, rock, and pop influences. They describe it as “arena rock by music school kids” and if that doesn’t capture it, nothing I write possibly could.

They opened their set with “Ideals,” a love song that moves from a barely-there first verse to the roaring, distorted bridge and back in under five minutes; “Sarah” from the “Trials” EP followed, during which I couldn’t help grinning. Lead singer/guitarist Alex Feder has more or less perfected his Michael Jackson-esque rave dancing without missing a note on guitar, and bassist Chris Bonner utilizes his corner of the stage to move in as many directions as he can at once. I couldn’t help but imagine hours spent in front of a mirror in high school. Precious.

As Bonner struggled with amp issues after “Sarah,” Feder filled the time with the ballad, “Oceana Roll,” which is short, straightforward, and fucking beautiful. It’s my life goal (dream big!) to find out what dancing the Oceana Roll actually means; my cursory research only produces this which, while awesome, is not a dance. Amps repaired, they introduced a new song, “Ignorance” which, like many of their new songs, is great for dancing. Bonus points for what I’m taking as a Jay-Z allusion in the line, “My problems number 99.”

They followed “Ignorance” with “Sock You In the Face With Love,” a drum-driven funk number about a creepily persistent dude. It’s darkly funny, and though I’ve been assured it’s not about domestic violence, the chorus still leaves a funny taste in my mouth. But it still sounds so fucking cool, and the crowd was really into it, so I don’t know what to think any more.

The band struck a bittersweet note with the new song, “No One That You Love Will Ever Die.” Feder dedicated it to Michael Jackson, sadly musing, “I guess today proves that [the song title] isn’t true.” After, they picked our spirits up again with a cover of Phil Collins’s “Take Me Home,” which everyone except me recognized by about the second line. (Full disclosure: I had to search the chorus of the song on YouTube to actually track it down.)

“Evening Life” followed, and my notes again reflect “rave dance moves” because I’d been drinking gin on an empty stomach, so I was more impressed by silly things than usual. The set ended abruptly after “Evening Life,” though it was overall a fun and engaging show. The XYZ Affair might be the tallest band I’ve ever seen at DC9.

XYZ will be back in town at the end of July, and in the meantime you can download “No One That You Love Will Ever Die” and “Sock You In The Face With Love” from their web site.

By the time Wheat finished setting up their synthesizers covered in googly eyes, I was a little too drunk to be credible. They opened with “My Warning Song” off the upcoming “White Ink, Ink.” It’s an engaging opener that begins with just drums and voice, adds bass and choral backing vocals eventually, but mostly is a minimalist pop song. The sound was a little muddled, and a little loud, which made it hard to understand what was going on at times.

“H.O.T.T.” came early in the set, and the crowd seemed receptive, bopping along a bit, but mostly absorbing the performance a little apathetically. Mikey did not respond well to a text telling him that Gimmy thought he looked like Wheat’s keyboard player. I clarified that they just had the same hair.

Wheat love DC, which they took time to tell us throughout the show. I started to wonder if they were as drunk as I was. They played another song that sounded like “H.O.T.T.” before “I Met A Girl,” which has aged well in that it’s no longer sung entirely in a thin falsetto. On “Little White Doves,” Mikey’s double, whose name I can’t figure out from Wikipedia, took over some lead vocals, and entered the thinning crowd.

Somewhere along the way, the band began employing the MacBook that had otherwise been sitting awkwardly on stage; I’m not sure what it was doing, other than counting off the beginning of each song (but Gimmy had just bought me a drink that I really didn’t need so I was a little distracted).

They closed with “Living and Dying vs. Dying and Living,” which employed plenty of fun harmonies. Sometimes the songs were hard to differentiate, but I’m going to chalk at least part of that up to everything being too loud but no particularly clear-sounding instruments.

“White Ink, Black Ink” comes out sometime in July. The 21st?