Friday Night Rock, however, is set to give us a taste of just the opposite -- maximalist bombastic drums and ecstatic cheers.
Get ready for the bold sounds of the band Aa, coming to Fuel this Friday for the second FNR of the term.
Crime Novels and Caring Babies will open the show.
When I first saw that Aa, a group from Brooklyn, was playing at FNR, I pronounced the band's name like "aah" in my head. It's really pronounced "Big 'A,' little 'A.'"
After giving the band a listen, I found that Aa is just what you would expect from a group that names itself after the first thing you learn in preschool.
The band's tribe-like drums, elephant trumpets and eerie chants fuse together with Game Boy-like synth beats and siren wails.
It sounds like chimps on high doses of espresso in an elementary school classroom banging their hearts out on desks and chairs. The Village Voice describes the band's sound as "an art-punk party-starting re-invention of the hippie drum circle."
On its MySpace page, the group calls its work a "never ending rhythm experiment."
This experimentation is evident in the band's most recent album, GAame (2007), in which saxophones are paired with electronics, percussion with throaty wails and disco samplings with cheerleader chants.
Aa's experimentalism doesn't end in the recording studio. The bands shows are full of pulsating energy characterized by uninhibited shouts and frantic on-stage movements.
As if their sound isn't enough to set them apart from their post-punk peers, they also do their own light show.
Devin McManus '10, FNR's booking manager, thinks Aa will make for an engaging show.
"It's a highly percussive group, and very live-oriented," he said in an e-mail.
The Friday night show will begin with Crime Novels, the solo project of Ellery Samson.
His sound, like Aa's, is drum heavy, guided by keyboard plinks and the twitters of various instruments mixed with samplings from his computer, an ever-present prop at his shows. Samson is a former member of the bands The Mall, Like Nurses, Cancer Fad and Of 1942.
He entered the music scene in San Francisco, but later moved to New York City where he toured with bands including Aa, That Ghost and HEALTH.
Caring Babies was recently added as the FNR show's second opening act. The solo artist, White River Junction, Vt.-native Matt Mazur, originally performed as Remote Controlled Robots. Mazur changed his name to Caring Babies after he forgot the MySpace password to his old web site. The local artist's repertoire primarily consists of remixes of another local ska band, the River City Rebels.
"The songs sound like they're being performed by a Nintendo Entertainment System that's cracked out on caffeine and riding a skateboard," McManus said in an e-mail.
Crime Novels and Caring Babies will open for Aa this Friday, April 10, in Fuel. Doors will open at 9:30 p.m. Bands go on at 10 p.m.
