1.
The last time I saw Joan of Arc may very well have been at a Voices in the Wilderness benefit at Tramps during the summer of 1999. If memory serves, they decided to play their set at as low a volume as was possible, which did a fine job of alienating the audience, some of whom listened keenly and some of whom resented having to strain. Either way, that struck me as the intended effect. More recently, occasional Joan of Arc member Mike Kinsella, aka Owen, played a set on the Knitting Factory stage that eschewed amplification for a significant portion of its running time. The brothers Kinsella, they do indeed know how to rattlea crowd.
The last time I saw Tim Kinsella make music was earlier this year: specifically, Make Believe’s set during Flameshovel’s SXSW showcase. They were loud, kinetic, and endlessly compelling; at some point during their set, my hair was mussed. Later in the night, I overheard two patrons at an IHOP discuss their psychic powers, which was about the only event that could have topped the set in question.
Opening up the Knitting Factory show was Katie Eastburn. I saw Young People, her previous (?) band, twice: once at the first East River Music Project show, at a time when I knew next to nothing about their music, and later on in the year, on a bill with Growing. I got more than a little obsessed with Young People’s second album, War Prayers, in a way that I was never quite able to do with the EP or album that followed it on Beggars. Everett True’s writing on the band definitely piqued my interest, and more recently, listening to San Francisco’s Cryptacize called back memories of listening to their album.
With all of that said, though, Eastburn’s solo set was the sort of thing that will likely prompt me to delve back into said back catalog with gusto. Alone on the stage with keyboard, bass drum, and the occasional programmed beat, her set was heavy on sonorous melodies and lyrics that alternately contrasted with or accentuated their low, moving backdrop. Some, as with Young People, broke off abruptly; others drew from cinematic dialogue for their lyrics. I’d normally make some sort of metafictional comparison here, but these weren’t songs that you considered clever — these were songs to move you, to envelop you. And given her ability to inhabit Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times”, that songwriting skill is matched by a born performer’s sensibility. Lean and tuneful, her set nearly torpedoed my sense of nostalgia for the night.
2.
And that lack of nostalgia suited Ponytail’s entrance just fine. I missed them when in Austin but have since heard outstanding things from trusted sources. And so it came to pass that three dudes and one lady — looking oddly like students from my high school circa 1994 — took to the stage. And then…
…here’s the thing. Vocalist Molly Siegel has this peculiar stage presence where she looks alternately like she’s about to be joyously raptured towards the heavens and as though she’s on the verge of leaping into the front row to deck half a dozen people in the face. Musically, that’s what you have going on as well. And that tension — between radiant, positive emotion and tense, jarring danger — was sustained for the duration of their set.
Enter the night’s headliners. The thing about Joan of Arc that impresses is the extent to which they sound like the sum of their history. Live, they’ve been sonic explorers, delighted by their experiments with textures and unconventional arrangements; they’ve also been confrontational, since their earliest days prone to defying what might be expected of them. The current live iteration manages to be both at once, as well as a fully functional, full-on rock band.
Their set drew equally upon the textured songs heard on Boo! Human and their more pastoral early work. Throw in a Tim Kinsella solo cover of “A Man Needs a Maid” and you have a rough approximation of the sonic range shown onstage. Nine years ago, the idea of Joan of Arc covering Neil Young would have seemed absurd. Circa 2008, it made a strange kind of sense, bolstered by Kinsella’s metaphorically logical explanation of why the song is meaningful to him. And throughout, there was a sense from the stage that the band had, in its current iteration, found a way to balance challenging music with a good-natured sense of release. Much like Frog Eyes — a band I’d love to see Joan of Arc or Make Believe share a tour with — there’s a smile at the end of the line, a mellowing that’s no less challenging for it.
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