Make Believe, The pAper chAse, Chin Up Chin Up & The Americas

There’s just something about The Americas that makes me grin like a shit-eating idiot every time I catch their set. It’s always been this way. Mainstays of Chico’s indie rock scene, the duo of Travis Wuerthner and Casey Deitz have really come up with an intriguing and visceral musical formula. While Wuerthner’s dynamic guitar playing and hyperactive, rapidly-spat vocals provide appropriate and captivating sound-washes and narratives, it’s at times difficult to divert attention from Deitz and his noteworthy skills behind the drum kit. His approach is as inventive as it is mind-boggling. Casey has a knack for injecting every song with an album’s worth of rhythmic satisfaction, and in doing so, really pushes The Americas’ music past prog-indie, into rock’s new math. We’re talking base eight shit here. Not to belabor the point, but Deitz’s rare mistakes are even impressive — for instance, during “Siam Brass Knuckles,” he dropped a stick, which only revealed the full, concise kick drum patterns nestled beneath his ride and tom beats. Theirs is a case where complexity doesn’t take away from the power of their music; you gotta see it to believe it. It’s a good thing.
Next, Chin Up Chin Up brought the trickiness factor down a notch or two, trading in math for melody. Their brand of indie pop is comparable with the Broken Social Scene, in that their tempos are fast enough to make that indie booty shake, and their sonorous and entwining instrumental melodies overshadow the vocals. Jeremy Bolen’s voice was mostly limited to a croak, barely audible above the quintet’s driving instruments; the best aspects of the band were their ability to mesh intricate but simple melodic passages together, supported by Chris Dye’s beautifully fractured drumming.
The highlight of this exemplary night of music had to be The pAper chAse, with their dizzying discordance and exaggerated showmanship. John Congleton’s guitar playing was basically the musical equivalent of vertigo; grasping the whammy bar for dear life, he flung his Stratocaster around his body, twisting topsy-turvy lead lines about like electric eels on fire. His body language mirrored the guitar-playing; his spindly frame swaying, dropping to the ground and generally flopping about the stage like a fish out of water, only to grab the microphone and manically gesticulate the storyline of the songs. The rest of the band — bass, cello, piano and drums — supported their frontman’s spasms with monumental power, bashing out spacious and monolithic octave chords in unison, driving the near-maudlin level of caustic immediacy far into the red. Definitely not music for the weak of heart, but if you’ve an adventurous ear, you should lend it to The pAper chAse.
Closing the evening was Chicago’s Make Believe, who dwelt within the super, super indie-fied area of the spectrum. Consisting of squirrelly guitar finger-tapping, a drummer who simultaneously played a Wurlitzer electric piano, ambiguously-toned vocals and solid bass playing, they keep a listener constantly guessing with incredibly mathed-out progressions and changes. Their set was engaging and unique, but where it succeeded in ability, it fell short in gratification. My less-than-stellar opinion of Make Believe’s set may be partially due to ear-fatigue from the night’s previous acts, but by 11 PM, I just wasn’t in the mood to search for the turn-around or the downbeat any longer.

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