On paper, the Fiery Furnaces and Inouk seem like an ideal pairing. Both play blues-based roots rock, and both have an indiscernible laundry list of influences. But on Friday night at the Black Cat, White Magic's brand of barefoot tribal folk got the award for most head-scratching set of the night.
Inouk exhibited the genre shifts evident on "No Danger," wandering from Crosby Stills & Nash's brand of Americana to the Stone Roses' trademark frantic madchester drum and bass.
Guitarist-keyboardist Alexander McMahon carefully tussled his hair between songs, and strategically unbuttoned his shirt as if he were a "Dead or Alive" acoustic-era Bon Jovi, and his brother, Damon, coincidentally served as his Richie Sambora. The three guitarists in Inouk might border a Collective Soul approach of derivative excessiveness, but with songs like "Search for the Bees" and "Elected," and paired with a drummer who looks like Charles Manson, they are anything but.
Next up was Drag City's White Magic, fronted by Mira Billotte, a Karen Carpenter/Mother Nature figure, and Andy Macleod, a bona fide Grateful Dead-loving, hiking boot-sporting REI salesman - who happens to play guitar. The trio's odd blend of apocalyptic freak-folk, without the self-indulgent smelly-jams, is what makes them more likely to play with Devendra Banhart than on Bonnaroo.
Is a song ever really finished? Does recording the track on tape mark the end of the creative process? Absolutely not, according to the Fiery Furnaces. Over the course of their headlining set, the band played nearly 40 songs in about an hour without pause, combining their discography of two LPs and a handful of 7s into a nonstop cluster of medleys and montages. Eight-minute pop epic "Chris Matthews," off the great adventure "Blueberry Boat," was played four times, each split in 30-second intervals sandwiched between shortened versions of "Quar Cur" and "Smelling Cigarettes."
At no point were any songs played the same way on record. While some were tweaked in the slightest ("Quay Cur"), others were drastically altered ("Tropical Ice-land," speeding the drum tempo and replacing the recorded synthesizer beats into a distinguishably different smorgasbord of beeps and boops).
But the center of attention wasn't the sibling heart of the band. It was drummer Andy Knowles that stole the show. Given Matt Friedberger's infatuation for all things Who, it's clear why Andy Knowles (the band's third, and presumably final drummer) belongs: He showboats like Keith Moon.
