Sepomana 2011

Seopmana, an annual music festival organized by WRMC, brought four acts to the stage Friday night at McCullough Social Space.

Das Racist, Free Energy, Oberhofe, and the Ivorys played for over four hours to a crowd that grew steadily towards capacity. The acts were sequenced well, giving the night a dramatic progression of revelry in four acts. Power-trio The Ivorys took the stage around 8:30 and played a raucous set to a small but receptive and growing crowd. Oberhofer played an artier and fussier, but no less enthusiastic, set as the place filled. With the endearing and sincerely fun Free Energy onstage, the night reached a climax. Hip-hop threesome Das Racist took the stage and brought the evening to a chaotic, rebellious close.

The Ivorys are a loud, chugging, revivalist rock band from Chicago featuring Sam White ’11 on bass. He splits vocal duties with Neil Candelora, the group’s versatile guitarist, and the group is anchored by drummer Brendan Lazar. Their songs bow before tested rock values like volume, simplicity and youth.

Four piece band Oberhofer brought a bit more theatricality to the stage. Dressed in polka dots, frontman Brad Oberhofer danced around stage as if he was “trying to make himself fall down while trying to stay on his feet at the same time,” observed Brittany Thomas ’14, wearing shoes that looked incredibly slippery, with a drip of curly black hair in his eyes, playing guitar, singing and yelping all the while. They play a brand of rock that proposes many grooves but refuses to relax into one. The band has received positive notices from internet critics, as well as a great deal of play on WRMC, and many in attendance sang and danced along. Brad Oberhofer is taking the year off from studying piano at NYU to tour with his eponymous band.

Philadelphia band Free Energy played an unabashed brand of rock and roll that had its heyday in the 1970s, in groups like Bad Company, Thin Lizzy and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Their hook-laden, exuberant set found a sweet spot somewhere between glam and power-pop and remained there for the show’s duration, eliciting fist-pumps and high-fives from the increasingly sweaty crowd. Lead singer Paul Sprangers gyrated lankily, flanked by the two guitarists whose dexterous interaction buoyed the arrangements and kept the band from sounding derivative. Theirs is a sound that baits comparison and influence-guessing, awash as it is in rock-genre signifiers like finger-tapped guitar solos and power chords. But they brought new life to the well-worn classic rock canon. They sounded like Queen, at times, or Journey — or maybe they have a sound all their own.

They are talented and confident musicians, if not wildly inventive, and the success of their set had as much to do with their attitudes as it did with their music.

“Sweet. This rules,” said Sprangers as he took the stage, and all five band members seemed to genuinely have a great time on stage together in front of the crowd. One journalist — scribbling a note about the eccentricities of Oberhofer’s footwear into a mini notepad — was struck lightly in the head by the neck of lead guitarist Geoff Bucknum’s guitar while Bucknum was mid-shred. Bucknum returned when the song was over to apologize good-naturedly. A minute later he leaned into the crowd while soloing (he soloed melodiously, often, and well) and pressed the body of his guitar into the face of an audience member, who stood still and held his hand to his cheek and stared wide-eyed, as if cured, for the elapsed time of one sugary chorus, sweaty and emblazoned with all six guitar strings.

The stage was then stripped and drum kits, guitars, microphone stands and the mass of cables that comprised the gear of the three preceding rock groups was replaced by a folding table on which sat three cordless mics and a laptop computer. This tableau nicely sums up Das Racist’s aesthetic: subversive, minimal and funny.  It also betrayed the shortcomings of their performance. Their funny, incisive and intelligent lyrics were often obscured, and at times they so subverted the concert-goers expectations as to barely perform at all.

A certain tension informed their show. The trio — MCs Heems and Kool A.D. and hypeman Dap — arrived onstage as if unsure of how they got there. Their show was shambolic, invigorating and unsettling. Heems wandered around the stage in socks like a teenager stumbling into the kitchen in the afternoon to breakfast on Pop Tarts. Kool A.D. made faces and distributed the group’s bottled water to the audience. At times, they faced the audience with a mix of indifference and antagonism, which, when in front of a ticket-holding audience amount to the exact same thing.

But at times they were explosively cool.

At their best, they tunnel beneath the predictable veneer of contemporary hip-hop and plant their dynamite. Sometimes, as on their first single “Combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell,” they just have dumb fun. Their appeal as rappers has to do with how they poke fun at hip-hop without sacrificing the things that make it great. They rhyme brilliantly and flow smoothly. They are perhaps the only MCs capable of dropping classicist hip-hop refernces, vapid internet lingo, nonsense and aspects of the liberal arts curriculum in the same 10 seconds, as they do on “Nutmeg”: “Queens Boulevard / Kierkegaard / Hustle hard / hustle hustle / oh em gee / ah ma gard / oh my God”. They rap over beats from a range of great producers some of which are catchy and accessible enough to flirt with commercial success. But commercial success is not what this group is after.

Is cool necessarily ironic? It was difficult to tell, watching them perform, how sincere they are, and how engaged, and if they are serious or joking or just stoned. These are questions they cultivate in their music, often explicitly, as in the song “hahahaha jk?,” the chorus of which goes: “we’re not joking, just joking, we are joking, just joking, we’re not joking.” Is it nonsense, or an indictment of ironical posturing and our generation’s generally insipid discourse? And are they laughing at us, or with us? This tension is what makes their music so vital and interesting. If their performance Friday night did not successfully answer any of these questions, in posing them they proved why they are a valuable, necessary, and vibrant part of our culture.

They have an obvious love of hip-hop and pop-culture, but rather than emulate the genre’s heroes they seemed to treat their own music with ambivalence. Heems was sleepy, and Kool A.D. was goofy; perhaps this explains the presence of hype man Dap, whose enthusiasm never once flagged.

Their particular brand of humor is ironic and subversive, more interested in breaking things down than building a new … what? That question remains unanswered. On Friday night they began by breaking down stereotypes, cultural norms and, eventually, rock and roll equipment. Throughout the show Kool A.D. strolled to the back of the auditorium to terrorize the gear the three preceding bands had stashed there. At one point he brought the drummer’s swivel chair to the fore of the stage and, lying prone on his belly, swiveled 360 degrees while rhyming. Later in the show he set up Oberhofer’s glockenspiel and raked his mic across the keys. While samples of distorted guitar played from tracks cued on the laptop, he played air guitar as if he had a very rough idea of how a guitar is played, or what that might look like. Or he was mocking the instrument, or celebrating it, with his own strange brand of exuberance.