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I've heard Anathallo described as one part indie, one part
marching band, one part musical theater and one part "oh my God my
brain just broke." I'm sure there is a dash of other things in there,
too, but I have neither the refined musical vocabulary nor expertise to
pick them out. Any way you describe it, their show at the Ottobar last
Thursday blew everyone away.

I was in the balcony for the entirety of the Ottobar show,
which, in the end, was a good call. As the concert got underway, the
space in front of the stage was packed by increasingly tall high school
kids. What the hell they were doing out on a Thursday night in their
Hot Topic and Pac Sun attire, giant black Xs emblazoned on their hands,
I will never know.

Royal Army Recording Company, a group from Frostburg, Md.
opened first, filling the "TBA" slot on the Baltimore ticket. They
earned immediate bonus points when I saw one of them hooking a violin
up to one side, and double that when they used it, and well, in their
show. There is nothing quite like seeing a man rock out on a violin.
That said, the level of rocking out you get from a violin and
predominantly acoustic guitar is distinctly different from other sorts
of rocking out. RARC is classic indie rock, with ballad-like songs, the
occasional duet and some sprinklings of other instrumentation courtesy
of their keyboard player (who, lamentably, seemed like he couldn't rock
out nearly as much as he wanted to, with a stationary instrument and
all). Their set was regrettably short, but as a small-time local band
that has only yet produced a record under the name of The Royal Army
Recording Company as of 2006, not surprising. Their information and
music samples, are available at http://www.royal-army.net.

Page France, listed on the ticket with Anathallo, was up next.
Despite (or maybe because of) favorable reviews from a friend, I was
underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong; they are a talented group of people.
But their music was distinctly folksy and the lead singer's voice had
an odd, nasal undertone to it -- when you don't love a band's style and
have issue with the sound of their singer's voice, there's just nowhere
to go from there. That said, I could listen to them, and if the day
comes when I have enough disposable income that I don't want to dispose
on other things, I'd pick up their CD. But they are not a band like
RARC or Anathallo that I could ever listen to on repeat. In their
favor, their music does have an endearing and almost fairy-tale feel
with a gentle xylophone plink and strummed guitar strings. Their lyrics
carry the same vibe, and with them, a kind of Zen warmth that's hard to
find (and hard to find properly executed) in much music. Their music is
available through http://www.pagefrance.net.

Anathallo was the last band to take the stage, coming on in all
their seven-person-ensemble glory and needing an impressively short
amount of time to set up the impressively many instruments they had on
hand. Any show with Anathallo becomes part concert part performance
piece, with each song shuffling band members around the stage to take
up different instruments, or engage in precisely timed dances -- if
clapping, folding in half and popping up can be counted as dance. I'm
going to say they can. I hesitate to classify Anathallo as anything but
simply indie as their member number and array of instruments are signs
enough that they like experimentation.

The sound of rain on a snare drum, wind chimes through a
xylophone (a popular instrument that night), clapping for a beat where
there might otherwise be a drum and the rolling crescendo of horns and
symbols are only the tip of the iceberg. Anathallo's lead singer has a
gentle, lyrical voice that lends itself to their more energetic songs
as well as the soothingly somber numbers like "Genessaret." Anathallo
closed their set with "Kasa no Hone (The Umbrella's Bones)," a song
that, despite its steady foothold in my iTunes Most Frequently Played
list, I still can't categorize. It's lilting, it's haunting, and, as I
realized for the first time at the show last night, it's in Japanese.
My friend was turned off by the idea of the awkward white boy at the
mic singing in an Asian language -- the word `fanboy' comes to mind --
but I was, and am, so won over by the borderline indescribable sound
that all I want to do is find the lyrics, sit down and translate.

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