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 . ■
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