Eugene weekly., February 09, 2012, Page 27, Image 27

music
Ripe for the Garage
It’s refreshing to see a strong woman on stage with a mandolin in her hands.
That particular role, typically dominated by male-bodied folk in string bands, is
pivotal. The mandolin, usually seen played by women only in its classical guise,
defines a great deal of string-band topography — those shrill plucks that carry
listeners over musical plateaus to mountain-top exclamations.
Fruition’s Mimi Naja is helping turn the tides on this patriarchal history of the
mandolin. Never shy about whipping out the guitar or banjo as well, Naja can
summon foot stompin’ and free spirits swooning at a moment’s notice. She and the
rest of the Portland-based quintet have been making quite the splash just north of
us, playing shows with the likes of Leftover Salmon, Greensky Bluegrass, Elephant
Revival, Dead Winter Carpenters and Water Tower Bucket Boys. Sam Bond’s will
showcase them Friday, Feb. 10, playing with Eugene’s Alder St. All-Stars — a rowdy
group of string pickers that never fails to get the tables and chairs cleared off
Bond’s dance floor. Fruition — with two guitars and well-rounded songs — certainly
leans more on the folky side of the string spectrum, but the band doesn’t wander
too far from the occasional jam. And lined up next to the hard-hitting grit of the
All-Stars, the band will fit right in, here in the Eug.
Fruition plays with the Alder St. All-Stars 9:30 pm Friday, Feb. 10, at Sam Bond’s;
$5. — Andrew Hitz
Third Eye Statesmen
Pretend for a moment that you’re a member of an iconic
music crew. You’ve released your seminal work years ago,
and prevailing trends have seen the mainstream of your
genre devolve from highly educated emcee orators into
codeine-guzzling degenerates (here’s lookin’ at you,
Wayne). You don’t want to raise a white flag to the
wackness, but you’re not about to give up on your life’s
work either. What do you do?
To find the answer to that question and more, I
made my way down to WOW Hall Tuesday night to see
Hieroglyphics, that hip hop super group rivaled only by the
Wu Tang in its deft displays of ensemble microphone crushing.
As I self-medicated in the beer den and observed the crowd, I suddenly felt I’d
traveled back in time to a campus basement party circa 1997: the vague muddied
beats blaring through long past due speakers, playing to a collection of people who
seem to have nothing in common other than the fact they were walking by and
heard the bass — stoners, slackers and surf rats, hoods in Oakland caps, all with an
excitement that could only have come from the realization that no one in the room
was going to demand that they get jiggy with it.
This show was advertised as a sort of showcase for the new material of each
respective Hieroglyph. I settled into a corner seat, content to spend my time
amongst the b-boys in the back, while the Hiero crew took the stage and put on a
hip hop clinic.
Rifling through abridged versions of tracks both fresh and classic, the former
new hopes of hip hop showed they hadn’t lost a step. Each emcee took his turn in
a revolving showcase of this-is-what-we’ve-done-for-you-lately, debuting cuts that
held up surprisingly well alongside older work. The group mixed in favorites from
the Hiero and Souls of Mischief catalogues, including a couple from ’93 Til Infinity.
They rocked crowd favorites spanning the gamut from my childhood to now — for a
lot of the heads in the audience, yours truly included, we literally grew up with
these guys. Kids who came into the world with the first Souls of Mischief record
are now graduating high school.
Toward the end of the show, Pep Love made mention of the fact that everyone
on stage had been in the game for a “long, long time … from the golden era … to
where we are now,” and this was true. But it was surreal witnessing a group so
defined by youthful exuberance now take the role of elder statesmen, all before
hitting 40.
Hip hop today is much like a bad reality show, a veritable GOP primary of pop
culture, filled with a cast of characters that, while technically qualified to be in
their positions, really have no business being there at all. I’m tempted to ask where
a group like Hieroglyphics is supposed to fit into all of it, until I realized that they
never will — and that’s a good thing. Hieroglyphics are the third eye of hip hop, a
group of emcees content to spit on their own terms, asking you to bridge the gap
between what you think is hip hop and what you know is. — Mark Sullivan
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