Coming not long after a celebrated reboot of the indescribable avant-jazz-rock group Ahleuchatistas, Cuneiform Records comes forth with a reminder of how they got to be celebrated to begin with.
The Summer We Went West [and East] – Live 2006 combines two shows played in 2006, with roughly the first half covering their first overseas gig at the Saalfelden Jazz Festival in Austria. The back half of the album came from the WMUC studio at the University of Maryland.
At the time of these recordings, this little band had already put out a few records but hadn’t been around long. Guitarist Shane Parish, bassist Derek Poteat and drummer Sean Dail had formed the trio just four years earlier in Ashville, North Carolina but was starting to gain traction soon after signing with Cuneiform Records in 2005.
Parish’s singular guitar attack was already fully installed at this early juncture. Rockabilly, math-rock, thrash-jazz even klezmer among other approaches appear in his presentation. Poteat and Dail more than keep up and on tracks like “Sherman’s March” they are in perfect lock-step with Parish’s delivery, even through all of those sudden pivots.
Similar to their studio records of the time, The Summer We Went West has that bite and terseness of punk; you hear a lot of what made the Minutemen so beloved, and indeed about half of these thirty-three songs clock in under two minutes. Their fragmented melodies and sharply swiveling tempos efficiently deliver intensity with no wasted seconds.
Even the short songs pack several ideas, the longer ones (which are still not all that long) can come across as sped-up, intricate multi-suite constructions. “Remember Rumsfeld at Abu Ghraib” sees Parish slowly playing a circular, single-line figure as all the action is happening with Poteat and Dail. Soon afterward, Parish moves into another figure at a faster tempo and the whole trio goes off running through about three more concepts. And yet, the hyperkinetic “RPG3” at about one-third the length races through just as many riffs.
The Ahleuchatistas have long ago proved to be a ferocious live act, able to nimbly replicate all those harmonic gymnastics on the stage, so The Summer We Went West [and East] – Live 2006 is a release that needed to happen and probably should have happened a long time ago.
The Summer We Went West [and East] – Live 2006 is available now. Get your copy from Bandcamp.
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