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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (March 7, 2019)
music All the Young Dudes YOUNG THE GIANT RETURNS TO EUGENE By Will Kennedy F rancois Comtois, the melodiously named Young the Giant drummer with Southern with Sure Sure California pop-rock band Saturday, March 9 • 9 pm Young the Giant, tells McDonald Theatre me that, from his vantage $29.50 advance, point, perched up high $33 door • all-ages on his drum riser, you get a special kind of feeling when a performance is going well. “Everything’s loose, everything’s year’s Mirror Master, a natural step for a band known coming easy,” he says. “You’re listening to everyone else. By the end of the first three or four for playing just off-center pop-rock built around the dreamy choirboy vocals of lead singer Sameer Gahdi. songs you’re going all out.” The band’s been together since they were all in When a show’s not going well, however, “You grit your teeth, and you get through it.” Even during a bad school, and this history is behind what makes the concert, “You can have fun with each other,” Comtois band work. “Our wives and girlfriends are all friends,” Comtois says. says. This chemistry helps the band manage all the These kinds of bumpy performances don’t happen very often anymore for Young the Giant, despite having different personalities. “There are a lot of opinions,” he gone through all the growing pains most bands go says. “We feel very passionately about them. You have to through, like playing to not a lot of people, Comtois says. know how to communicate.” In 2010 the band scored minor hits with “Cough These days, though, Young the Giant does particularly well in college markets such as Eugene, where the band Syrup,” “My Body” and “Apartment” off their self-titled debut. has seen a resurgence in popularity. How novel it seemed, even then, for a band to write Young the Giant is back in town supporting last PHOTO BY WESLEY YEN straight-up pop-rock tunes that still manage to feel touched by human hands. Yet Young the Giant manages the feat time and time again, including the single “Superposition.” Despite Mirror Master coming just last year, the band is already working on some new material. “We’ll be writing and recording,” Comtois says. “We’ll start to get loose ideas. Usually we kind of wait for one or two songs to connect with us. That will put us on a path. It’s probably a little too early to tell.” For now, Young the Giant is looking forward to getting back to Eugene. “We will put on a hell of a show,” Comtois says. “Especially if we have a little Willamette Valley wine waiting for us.” ■ Coping Mechanisms EXPLORING THE MUSIC OF TRAUMA Entresol with Eugene’s Synaptic and XrayVsns Friday, March 8 • 9:30 pm Sam Bond’s $5 • 21-plus. W e all have different coping mechanisms to get through trauma, large and small. Eugene experimental noise artist and musician Joshua Isaac Finch, who performs as Entresol, copes with trauma by making music — music sometimes made by the sound of Finch screaming into an Altoids tin full of mints. E U G E N E W E E K LY . C O M By Will Kennedy “With a contact mic in it,” Finch says, “run through distortion and a pitch shift, and also reverb.” The product of this experiment found its way onto Entresol’s latest EP, the fantastically titled How Quickly We Normalize What Feels Like the End of the World. EP tracks like “Mortise & Tenon” are a little like a Tom Waits dub remix, blended with Nine Inch Nails and a weirdly deconstructed 12-bar blues song structure, frozen in liquid hydrogen and then shattered with a hammer. It’s “intentionally weird,” Finch says, oversimplifying the work. “This EP in particular is maybe the most minimalist,” Finch says. “It’s largely comprised of contact mics, distortion pedals, one severely outdated Boss drum machine and metal boxes.” Nevertheless, on the new EP Finch tried to balance harshness and abrasiveness with hooks. “Something to bring people back,” he says. “Each track on the album is about something fairly different. In each case, there’s an atrocity, a personal or large-scale trauma, that has been adjusted to,” Finch says. This can be a necessary means of coping, but it can be problematic. “Remaining bothered, remaining upset, is a necessary part of moving forward,” Finch says . ■ M A R C H 7 , 2 0 1 9 21
