Junior Boys & Max Tundra @ Neumo’s
The first thing I noticed about Ben Jacobs, the man better known as Max Tundra, was how incredibly short he was. I caught my first glimpse of him as he strolled across the main floor at Neumo’s last night, to go hang out at the merch table before his show started, short enough that he was barely noticed by the still-thin crowd. Maybe that has something to do with his larger than life, ADD stage show. For one man with a few keyboards and assorted toy instruments, he sure did command attention.
The music on his three full-length albums is composed with the aid of Amiga computers, outdated samplers, and an assortment of musical oddities, from melodica to Moog, then topped with his voice (and once in a while, his sister Becky’s). It’s dense, spastic, ADD-inspired pop that can’t keep still, and doesn’t leave so much as a 16th note of rest, yet still retains a bewildering accessibility. It would be impossible to re-create these compositions live, without hiring a rather large band of rather talented musicians, ones who could keep up with his off-kilter rhythmic sense and non-traditional arrangements, so instead he relies on prerecorded backing tracks, and lot of personality.
As soon as the first note of his live set started, he was off, twitching his arms and bouncing around the stage uncontrollably, snapping back into position at the mic whenever it was time to deliver some lyrics. This sort of quirky, bouncy pop isn’t exactly what I would expect before Junior Boys, but it definitely works. Leaning heavily on his new album, Parallax Error Beheads You, but drawing on material from all three full lengths, he kept the crowd bouncing and laughing, despite some regrettable sound issues. Is Neumo’s trying to convert their bass bins into sonic weapons for military use? For the most part, it wasn’t too bad, just extra loud and fuzzy in the low end, but the bass-heavy track “The Entertainment” suffered the most from the sternum-rattling pulse of low end. He finished up with a cover of “Goodbye, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen Adieu”, and then departed for the merch table, to sell limited edition downloadable versions of his record packaged with a can of soup. Seriously.
Now normally, it would be tough to follow up an act like Max Tundra, but Junior Boys benefited from being 1) incredibly popular (the entire dancefloor and balcony were packed to capacity by the time their set started) and 2) extremely tight. Augmenting their synthpop with a live drummer, the band played through pristine renditions of some of their best material, bringing a huge cheer when they closed out their main set with “In The Morning”, and drove the dancers into a slow-burn frenzy during their encore with the long krautrock crescendo of “Under The Sun”. The only song I was hoping to hear that they skipped over was “Bits & Pieces” “Dull to Pause” [Thanks for the correction, Donna!] from the new album, Begone Dull Care. Even with this omission though, their set was satisfying and fun, if not as innovative a spectacle as Mr. Tundra’s opening set.
