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Boy Genius/ Amo Joy!/ Nervous Systems/ Oh Sanders, PopFest 2008, Little Kings, 8/13/08

by Fran McDonald
08/14/2008

It is Day Two of Popfest and I get to the venue early because I have not yet adjusted to Athens Time (add half an hour to any deadline and make sure you look disinterested and unapologetic when you finally wander in). I am whiling away the time before the first bands of the day kick off by remoulding my body around a dubious-looking armchair in Little Kings. Little Kings as a venue perfectly encapsulates my current mental and physical state. It is ramshackle and frayed at the edges, a graveyard of beaten up non-matching chairs and random broken curiosities. Someone somewhere has anticipated the hungover state of today's PopFest crowd and has provided teeny tiny cups of Tex-Mex and peanuts on the bar which at one point I am tempted to shoot like tequila. I refrain not out of a sense of social nicety but because I am too exhausted to contemplate wrestling my way out of the chair that has somehow folded all around me.

As the afternoon crowd trickles in and, grey-faced and resolute, start ordering beers, Boy Genius come onto the stage. Looking at them is like looking at a billboard for a kids cartoon. The lead singer is wearing a cowboy shirt and pushes his hair out of his eyes in good old Morrissey fashion. The bassist is centre stage and wears the Official Indie Uniform of stripy shirt and Converse sneakers. The female guitarist looks like she just stepped out of Ghostworld with thick red glasses and a gigantic mint green guitar, and the drummer is wearing a blue and white prairie dress and could probably slide seamlessly into Arcade Fire when no one was looking. They are wholesome to look at, I quite want them to solve mysteries at the same time every day, and when they start playing they play fast, clean pop songs with precision and obvious relish. I feel like I have heard their songs before but it is because their beats synchronize perfectly with my heartbeat and there is a balance to the arrangements - all four have microphones and harmonize in true 1960s style, with crowd-pleasing bababas and nananas. My erratic internal organs are calmed by the layered wall of sound they create that fills out the room in an unabrasive and cushioning manner. It is the kind of music that makes you want to drive as fast as you can without breaking the speed limit, that makes you want to marry the boy next door but first you have to steal him from his girlfriend. It is impulsive but essentially innocent.

I am outside monitoring the Obligatory Hungover Standoff between my ragged lungs and my desire for a cigarette when the next band, Amo Joy, come on. From my hazy sun-baked seat it sounds like someone just gave Wayne Coyne a marching band and lots of stimulants and told him to improvise. If Boy Genius are whizzing past cornfields and tracing the wave of the rushing air with outstretched fingers, Amo Joy! are cartwheeling down the Blue Ridge Mountains without brakes. I have no doubt that if I slammed their CD on to my car stereo on the way to the supermarket I would end up in Santa Cruz with a back seat full of vintage baseball cards and inflatable animals and rusty mailboxes and verbose hitchhikers. I glare at the offensive cigarette which will be much more appealing in twenty minutes after I am introduced to the scary hybrid cocktail that is Sparks, and head inside.

It appears that, in my absence, Little Kings has been transformed in to a psychedelic church of percussion. The grinning keyboardist is bounding through the crowd handing out neon novelty clapping, hooting, and whistling toys which are being grasped with enthusiasm by the crowd. "You are the noise-makers!" the lead singer proclaims, and so we are, the rhythms roll through the room and it feels like we are in a field somewhere and everyone is of one mind and one voice.

Instrumentally I have no clue what is going on. I think I hear an accordion but I could be wrong. There is a kazoo and a ukulele and bells and slide whistles and plastic contraptions and unnameable implements and all are being madly circulated by the band. There is a sense of pleasant circular disorientation to the music itself, it is a swirling carousel of electronic innovation and the stamping of feet. I look up to the rafters and the old bulbous chandeliers are swaying and for the first time I notice that there is a battered bicycle sitting unobtrusively on a raised platform to the side of the stage. And it is perfect because this is Amo Joy!, beauty through the juxtaposition of random oddities. I am obscenely excited by the whole raucous experience, I want to follow them around the country in a big battered bus and sing the wrong lyrics to Pet Sounds with conviction. It was the kind of show which makes me want to carry a pen around for the rest of my life so I can tattoo their name on to random people's hands all across the world.

Outside is now unreasonably hot and each time the crowd piles outside to smoke the expletives get louder and more imaginative. Afternoon Naps are up next but I am too busy trying to maintain the perfect equilibrium between caffeine and alcohol to write meaningful witticisms into my notebook. Right now, even the prospect of standing and writing simultaneously is making my brain hurt. Words are spoken, delegation occurs. Half an hour later and I have acted on my genius plan to level out the Sparks with PBR. I am feeling top notch and more than ready for Nervous Systems, the next band of the day. Nervous Systems have a synthesizer, so already I am pleased. Their sound is vague, violent, and introspective. Its the equivalent of setting someone's car on fire and then leaving an apologetic and highly personal, meandering note taped to their front door. They play their instruments like they are enacting revenge on the strings and keys and drum skins, and they don't look up, not once. But this is part of the act, it smacks of Joy Division and dark lit Manchester basements. The songs atrophy and then build again, the drums are insistent and complex, the disconcertingly melodic vocals are drowned in all-consuming sound. I want to do an Ian Curtis marching dance but I feel silly. They play their instruments, finish their set, and then they leave the stage. I wander outside to catch Round Three of the Athenians versus the Georgia sun.

The crowd has started to disperse a little and the electric atmosphere created by Amo Joy! is beginning to wane. I contemplate going home but the Tex-Mex is still free and I am a perpetual student when it comes to free snack-products. I may write Tex-Mex Inc. a short but friendly letter thanking them for their part in keeping me in Little Kings for that extra hour, because the next band, Oh Sanders, were beautiful and wonderful and exceptional and I could go on in this same vein but I won't because I can't find the thesaurus function on a Mac computer. Whilst Nervous Systems was disjunctive and perfunctory and a little jarring, Oh Sanders are smooth and eloquent. I never really understood before that sound itself could be lyrical. Electronic riffs that remind me of my old battered Nintendo 64 are joined by a heavy bass pulse and then the drums come in and you can't wait for the final layer, for Stella Leung's vocals to open out in to the air, and then it does and it moves jagged but delicate. At times she will sing at the top of her lungs away from the microphone and there is a sense of freedom and immediacy, other times the band cuts out completely and leaves her voice hanging and bare. They are utterly infectious, the whole room fills back up and no one goes to the bathroom, strangers keep turning to each other and grinning, every time a song finishes I just want to shout "But it's just so GOOD!" It is like being on a train rushing through a station and glimpsing faces on the platform - strangely intimate but forever railing on at top speed. It is impossible to not move, even if it is just the subtle tapping of the collarbone with the thumb or a gentle sway of the hips, the whole room is alive. I often judge bands by how comfortable I feel dancing during their set and with Oh Sanders it was instinctual and utterly irresistable. I wish I knew who they sounded like so I could have more of the same, but they are truly their own breed.

The noise the crowd makes when Oh Sanders finish their set is uproarious and utterly deserved. This, for me, is what makes PopFest such an exciting event, that at 3 pm on an innocuous Wednesday afternoon you can stand in a little bar with maybe fifty other people, and experience music that, in a perfect world, would filter sweetly out of speakers everywhere.