Pedro the Lion and Flock of Dimes
Atlantis, Washington DC, July 3, 2024
According to
setlist.fm, I’ve seen
Pedro the Lion now six times, which puts them in a tie for third position for number of times I’ve seen an artist.
This is pretty good for a Jewish guy.
For the better part of 30 years, David Bazan has done bitter, gripping, fiercely constructed rock songs about his crisis of faith, and his stark ambivalence toward his religious upbringing. I first encountered Bazan and his band (named after an illustrated book from his childhood) as a frequent touring partner of Low, but I also saw him in solo shows, during which he would take questions on theology from evangelical punk teenagers, and weigh in with impressive acuity and subtlety about religious teaching in between songs.
I wrote a
lot of words on this website about Pedro the Lion at one point in my life, and I was absolutely thrilled a few years ago when Bazan returned as Pedro the Lion, after years of touring under his own name as a solo act. He’s currently in the middle of a three-parts (so far) series of autobiographical records about his upbringing, starting in
Phoenix (2018),
Havasu (2022), and continuing to
Santa Cruz (2024). It’s not quite Sufjan Stevens’ plan to do an album for each of the 50 states, but this is an impressive undertaking he’s in the middle of. In his current tour, much is made of the fact that Bazan is leading the band from behind the drum kit, after years of playing lead guitar. But as he relays in one of the songs on the record
Havasu, purchasing a drum kit was a transformative moment in his childhood, so it’s moving to see him behind the snare and the bass drum.
I spent much of the show on July 3 chitchatting with Lars Gotrich, the NPR music correspondent whom I’ve gotten to know amidst many different shows in the DC area. Lars comes out of the evangelical community, and he relayed that one of his friends, seeing a Pedro the Lion show in Brooklyn, had texted him, “Is everyone here the victim of childhood spiritual trauma?” I think, for a long time, that wrestling with childhood spiritual trauma was an appeal for some folks, but I just always loved Bazan’s skill as a lyricist, his aptitude for grasping a solid concrete detail to illustrate a broader thematic element, and his band’s pure skill as a full-throated rock ensemble. (
Control in 2002 was the record where that first emerged, but he returns to that mode periodically.) Incidentally, Lars mentioned that he’s seen Bazan between 12 and 15 times, which is on brand.
While Pedro the Lion is mostly touring on its current trilogy of autobiographical records, Bazan mixes in older material, and doesn’t make the narrative overly literal. For instance, he brought in songs from his albums
Control,
It’s Hard to Find a Friend, and
The Only Reason I Feel Secure (is that I am validated by my friends), in the midst of his autobiographical material about his teenage years in Arizona and California. In some cases, particular lyrics provide a broader context to the formative elements of Bazan’s childhood and young adulthood; the yellow bicycles of Phoenix and drum kits of Modesto and the song in his Walkman headphones that provides him with strength and inspiration during a moment of high school doubt.
No matter how fascinating Bazan’s life story is, the songs have to work. And mostly, they do. I personally gravitated to the muscular rock of
Control and the 2018 reunion album
Phoenix, but he did nine songs from
Santa Cruz, and two each from
Phoenix and
Havasu in the setlist of the previous night, and the clear emphasis was on the storytelling and the mise-en-scene of a talented, spiritually-inclined teen of the 1980s. (For some reason, no one preserved the setlist of the Atlantis show, but here is the
setlist from the day before in North Carolina.)
At the outset, Bazan seemed a bit quiet and subdued, and he thoughtfully hinted that he wouldn’t be talking to the audience much. But that all changed rather quickly, with the responsiveness of the crowd and Bazan’s befuddlement about being in Washington DC right before the Fourth of July and during a national election cycle. The band would prepare to start a song and he would suddenly launch into an anecdote and derail the set up, but it was all in good form for an artist like Bazan. This version of Pedro the Lion is on the more muscular side, but he also did some of the quieter and more theologically inclined songs from his early records, including a few that got Lars particularly excited. Maybe “Of Minor Prophets and their Prostitute Wives”? Or “Bad Things to Such Good People”? I can’t recall and the setlist was not posted…. Ah, but wait, it was “
Secret of the Easy Yoke,” from
It's Hard to Find a Friend, in the midst of one of his song cycles about belonging to a church while feeling disconnected from its followers. Good song!
Opening for Pedro the Lion was another artist I’ve waited a very long time to see again.
Flock of Dimes is the solo project of Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak, and I like her in this mode much more than her primary band.
I saw Flock of Dimes tour in 2016 following the release of the first full-length under that name
If You See Me, Say Yes, but Wasner put the project on hold for a long time, focusing on her primary band and her production work (oh, and joining Bon Iver), until the lush and swooning pandemic-era record
Head of Roses.
It’s funny, I think of
If You See Me, Say Yes as a CD, and
Head of Roses as a vinyl record, and it’s not just because that’s the format in which I own them.
If You See Me is basically a gussied-up indie synthpop record with syncopated, mildly danceable numbers like “Semaphore” and “Ida Glow,” and it has a lot of touchstones that call back to the Postal Service or Sylvan Esso.
Head of Roses is a slow-burning double-vinyl long-player that allows Wasner to show off her guitar playing, dreamy in tone, with lyrics of heartbreak and self-doubt. It’s a tremendous album and Wasner’s singing has never been better.
At the Atlantis, Wasner was playing guitar and singing with a single accompanist, also on guitar. Most of the brief opening set was dedicated to
Head of Roses, but everything fit thematically and sonically, even the
If You See Me material like “Everything Is Happening Today.” She eschewed the electro-pop gloss of the dancier material from her early work (she didn’t play her singles, like “Semaphore,” at all) so the set had an aesthetic continuity where everything was given the same dreamy melancholic swoon of
Head of Roses.
It sounded great, and her singing and guitar were exquisite, but part of me missed the bright color palettes and energy of the
If You See Me tour, where she and a fuller band did a more rousing stage show (and a
kick-ass Crowded House cover for The Onion A/V Club). But this was not the vibe Wasner was going for at the Atlantis; instead, it was the heart-in-throat melodrama and anguish of “Price of Blue” and “Two,” with their imagery of relationships crumbling: “Can I be one, can we be two?” And mortality: “And we're all just wearing bodies, like a costume 'til we die.”
As a Baltimorean who relocated to North Carolina (to join what some folks have called the extended Sylvan Esso-Wye Oak cinematic universe), she spoke with great joy and affection of the old 9:30 Club, whose atmosphere the Atlantis is meant to re-create. And she made good on her promise to speak with everyone who wanted to buy merch or just chat a bit; I already own the records so I wasn’t going to buy anything but we had a few lovely moments.
Again, no one documented the setlist. But if you want to hear some of the
Head of Roses material with Wasner’s adoptive North Carolina musical family (Sylvan Esso, Megafaun, Mountain Man, etc.) you should see the Flock of Dimes pandemic-era
Tiny Desk Home concert.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/19/2024 09:41AM by zwirnm.
