Crystal Stilts’ singer Brad Hargett spent most of Tuesday night’s performance on May 10th at Mississippi Studios in Portland, OR in draped in a heavy coat. When the songs entered instrumental passages, he would move his hands quickly into his pockets. The winter coat as onstage garb carries a certain provocative power, calling to mind the young Strokes (QRO album review) touring behind Is This It. At those performances, singer Julian Casablancas’ (QRO solo album review) coat suggested to the band’s critics “Yes, I may in fact be exiting just as suddenly as I arrived, thank you very much.” In Hargett’s case, though, it’s doubtful that the coat was intended as a power play. One expects that he was just cold.
Mississippi Studios has a way of sounding and feeling like a bigger venue than it is. This comes of having a sound system much better – and much louder – than one would expect the small room to require. As such, the space demands a great deal of both performers and their audiences. The audience’s role is practical: there need to be enough bodies in the room to diffuse the sound and to warm the air. During the opening sets by Archers and Case Studies, audience members who hadn’t found a roost on the balcony could be counted in single digits and the room was cold and loud.
When an audience did finally materialize in the moments just before Crystal Stilts took the stage, the room remained decidedly frigid. It’s hard to blame the band, though, considering how closely they hewed to the sound of their recordings. Those are cold recordings and in the live context every element fell somewhere on the spectrum from chill to chilly. The droning, essentially wordless vocals, the reverb-drenched waves of surf guitar and frozen shards chipped from the organ all inspired more shivers than shimmies or shakes.
Keyboardist Kyle Forester proved to be the band’s linchpin, his playing immediately setting the tone of each song. Rather than picking out the vintage Moog-like tones that have for years been a foregone conclusion in these settings, he reached to sounds from an older and spookier place, evoking not just the fuzzed out organ sounds of the sixties but such lost coloring agents as Theremins and the primitive oscillators of the Simeon. On songs like “Sycamore Tree” – the opening cut from the group’s recent Slumberland release In Love With Oblivion – the combination of pulsing bass with primitivist electronics created a perfectly appropriate backdrop for Hargett’s vocals, aligning the band with a tradition of east coast psychedelia as practiced by the likes of Silver Apples and Suicide.
Forester also played a role as a more relatable foil to the distant Hargett. With the reverb on Hargett’s microphone rendering crowd interaction impossible, the heavy task of creating intimacy in this forbidding room fell to Forester. Even in silence, though, Hargett’s rigid, shyly magisterial pose had a way of establishing a mood. As a large shadow image of Hargett cast onto the rear wall flickered and danced amidst the club lights, the man at the lip of the stage stood as silent and inscrutable as, well, a shadow.