Heroes of Toolik Reprise One of 2018’s Most Entrancing Shows in Williamsburg This Weekend
On one hand, the idea of Heroes of Toolik squeezing themselves into Pete’s Candy Store might seem incongruous. On the other hand, the band have pared down their sound to a more acoustic, pastoral, overcast psychedelia. Their show at the irresistibly intimate new Spectrum, out by what’s left of the Brooklyn Navy Yard last month, revealed a side of the band that they’d been percolating for a long time but really perfected with their 2016 album Like Night. They’ll be at Pete’s at 8;30 PM on March 25, and then at Sunny’s on April 17 at 9:30.
At the Spectrum show, the psychedelic factor might have been ratcheted up a few notches by a ringer rhythm section. Brian Adler took over Billy Ficca’s drum chair with a slithery pulse, using his hardware and rims for all kinds of spectral flickers. On bass was the most acerbic and funniest composer in jazz, Mostly Other People Do the Killing’s Moppa Elliott, playing the changes with a deadpan slink. Frontman Arad Evans played acoustic guitar with more of a spiky, incisive attack than he typically does when he’s on electric.
The songs ran the gamut of several decades’ worth of psychedelic, new wave and early CB’s era postrock influences. A swaying anthem with meticulous, nuanced vocals from violinist Jennifer Coates and tersely looming trombone from John Speck came across as sort of a mashup of lo-fi 90s British rock – think Comet Gain – and the Grateful Dead. Throughout a vampy post-Television rainy-day psychedelic mini-epic, the guy/girl vocals of Evans and Coates brought to mind similarly slinky, hypnotically jangly zeroes Brooklyn band Liza & the WonderWheels. Coates took lead vocals on another much more spare, marching number, with a clipped, broodingly precise delivery that brought to mind another luminary from the zeros, Erika Simonian.
As the show went on, there were several detours into freer improvisational interludes, individual voices going out on a limb and then reconfiguring in turn. Was Elliott going to indulge the crowd in any tongue-in-cheek shenanigans? As it turned out, no: he was just having fun chilling back with the drums. The overall ambience was enigmatic, sometimes bordering on trance-inducing, a constantly shifting textural intertwine of violin, guitar and trombone over a thicket of beats. Get your trance on at Pete’s on the 25th.