Tendaberry/ One Happy Island/ Hat Company/ Fat Planet, PopFest 2008, Little Kings, 8/15/08

Hat Company

by Alexander Dimitropoulos
08/16/2008

Irony and a vocal poke in the ribs are fun, inventive ways of sterilizing a song. When Television’s Tom Verlaine and N.E.R.D.’s Pharrell Williams say “get it?” after some wordplay in “See No Evil” and “Maybe,” respectively, they jolt the listener out of the world they’ve created. They speak/sing something clever, point to it and then ask the listener, “Wasn’t what I just did clever?” Sentiments expressed in the lyrics can also become suspect. Tendaberry, the first performers of Aug. 15’s Popfest show at Little Kings, had the same issue and even sounded a little bit like N.E.R.D.’s album Fly or Die.

Tendaberry have picked up on many of the visual and auditory cues from rock and roll history, signifiers that originally didn’t recall anything at all. They elicited a response because they were brash, careless, virtuosic or simply gave the finger to performers who played noodling guitar solos (even Eddie Van Halen once compared those to “pissin’ up a rope” in a Rolling Stone interview, and he’s the man who made “Eruption”). But Tendaberry have missed much of the substance behind those gestures, much in the same way that some cultural critics chastise hipsters for mimicking the countercultural in a commercialized, ironic way.

So Jonathan Merenvich, lead singer and guitarist of Tendaberry, doesn’t bend strings during his performance. Fine. He slides barre chords up and down the neck of the guitar during the show, with few exceptions. Singing and playing an instrument at the same time is difficult, so give him the benefit of the doubt there as well. But hitting a guitar pedal and then striking all six open guitar strings does nothing more than demonstrate the effect of the pedal. Pretending you’re going to smash your Fender Stratocaster onstage Hendrix/Townshend style doesn’t do much when you haven’t given the instrument a good going-away shredding first.

Other parts of Tendaberry’s performance were awkward. The band started by playing some overwrought snippets of R.E.M.’s “So. Central Rain” and Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.”

To his credit, Merenvich did play with a lot of energy, jumping into the crowd to shake hands, play guitar with his teeth and hand out free copies of Tendaberry’s EP Am I Still illmatic?, which sounds better than the band’s live performance. Tendaberry closed its set with a song that transitioned from Ghostface Killah’s “Cherchez LaGhost” to Prince’s “Controversy” to the Talking Heads’ “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On).” It had a Bo Diddley/juba guitar rhythm, for which I’m always a sucker, and was entertaining overall. So it’s clear that the members of Tendaberry have consumed the best of rap, funk and post-punk music. Based on their performance at Little Kings, however, they’re still figuring out what to do with it.

The second band of the night, Boston’s One Happy Island, were one of the most democratic bands I’ve ever seen. Everybody gets a vocal microphone. Calling any member of the band the “lead” anything is impossible, because lead vocal, ukulele, bass and guitar duties changed several times throughout the course of the concert. One of the band members went from acoustic guitar to trumpet in the same song. On the band’s second to last song, he had to get on one knee to sing, shake a maraca and play a synthesizer. He had a soft, patient voice, the main electric guitar player sang with Stephen Malkmus’s offhand, wavering wisdom, and the drummer, the only woman in the group, sang with a sweet, full voice. The band’s final song had vocal duties popcorning to every person on stage. Innocently catchy pop songs are easy to enjoy but difficult to create. These four are definitely worth your time, if you can catch them or their Secret Party That The Other Party Doesn’t Know About EP.

Hat Company’s performance began with the lead singer alone on guitar, playing a ditty with a Hawaiian feel in the middle of the crowd. After that, the band started in full swing with some surf rock numbers that they played really well, including “Midst of Seasons,” which sounds like a The Music Tapes song, though more straightforward. They had a song they claimed to have written a day and a half ago, for which they invited potential song titles, and played only one song of their old album. On the band’s closer, “Amber Brown,” someone from the audience hopped onstage with a noisemaker after the song was over (or almost over) and started singing “Amber Brown” in the song’s original melody. Hat Company continued to play the song, and then the lead singer went to trombone. He then became a second drummer, and the percussive finale was thrilling. Another of their songs had the tender, deceptively simple construction of an Apples in Stereo song, so when the bespectacled Apples frontman Rob Schneider showed in the audience, I assumed he was just there to enjoy the music.

He was really there to perform, and he wasn’t alone. Joining him were fellow Elephant 6 founders Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart, as well as Peter Erchick (Olivia Tremor Control, Pipes You See, Pipes You Don’t) and Charlie Johnston (The 63 Crayons, The New Sound of Numbers). Schneider and Doss formed the band, Fat Planet, while in high school in Ruston, La., and their show at the Little Kings was a reminder (or introduction) to the crowd for just how much fun it is to play in a band.

Schneider and Hart were the most talkative onstage, and of the two, Schneider seemed to loosely steer the afternoon performance.

“Take note other acoustic impromptu bands,” Schneider joked.

The person who wrote the song that the band was going to play took the acoustic guitar, and the person backing him was given what Schneider dubbed “the magical awesome guitar,” a tiny, nylon-stringed thing. Johnston drummed, Erchick played, among other things, a kazoo, and the bongos made their way around to several people.

They played “Warm Milk & Chocolate,” a song that Schneider and Hart wrote on a 4-track recorder while in high school and my favorite performance of the night.

They talked about which songs to play and which songs to save (“Mercury Mother,” they had practiced beforehand; some of the others, they had not).

“We’re not very well prepared,” Schneider said. “Sorry, friends.”

They played Olivia Tremor Control’s “The Opera House,” the most rousing, impassioned song of the night, which had people singing along in the audience. Fat Planet closed with Apples in Stereo’s “The Rainbow.”

There was a “bear walks into a bar” joke (the punch line involved a play on pause/paws), banter about the wall art, toying with poorly placed equipment, a lot of starting and stopping, and, most importantly, a group of people who have some of the best ears and voices for original melodies in this town or any other. And as anything involving stripped down, naked performances with a kazoo should be, it was totally hilarious.