Show Report: The Bevis Frond/Immaterial Possessions @ The LodgeRoom, 3/12/2025 (#17)
Ah, the Bevis Frond's triumphant return to Los Angeles after a 20-plus-year absence. There were hiccups. This show was supposed to have taken place last year. Because of the rescheduling, only a small contingent made it out when the big Bevis Frond day finally arrived. That may have been because of the demographic. It was a school night, and the crowd was what I like to call a babysitter show in that it was evident most of the people there hired babysitters so they could see it. I was probably one of the youngest people in attendance, which, you know, not going to lie, felt great for once. Usually, everyone looks at me like I'm some kind of cursed mummy who was jostled awake by a soundcheck and is now shambling around the venue looking for young brains to eat to revive my shamefully desiccated husk. (I remember at one show, kids started fighting in front of me, and everyone turned to me to stop it. Uh, no, I am not the show dad, and I proceeded to let the children scrap like budding hockey enforcers.) Of course, there are tradeoffs. While the older crowd at Bevis Frond meant that there was little of the typical show bullshit perpetrated by youngsters that have been annoying me of late, I was punished by stray, eye-wateringly awful old-man farts. It was a constant crop-dusting of involuntary gas emissions. Sometimes, you can't win at all.
Anyway, perhaps the youngest people there were Immaterial Possessions. The Athens, Georgia, band looked fresh-faced, playing a variant of gothy psych that was far older than they were. Wasn't into it. No offense to the band, but the quirk factor was off the charts and lost me quickly. This was an archaic kind of quirk, too, which made the band feel like re-enactors and clashed with its overabundance of innocence. Something just felt off. It was as if Kleenex played pastoral folk-psych or something, and while that looks awesome on paper...yeah...I don't know. Not for me. Still, with only two bands on the bill and Immaterial Possessions wrapping early, it seemed like it was going to be an early night.
It wasn't. The Bevis Frond played for two hours, the longest set I've seen in years. Count 'em: 19 songs, none of them very short. No matter, the band is a good hang. Singer/guitarist Nick Saloman was in storyteller mode, introing every song with some fun anecdotes like the BBC radio royalty rate for one of the band’s “two greatest hits,” and how one promoter of a famous psych fest refused to book the Frond for ages on the mistaken belief that it didn’t have any of the psych visual hallmarks. Granted, it’s true, they don’t look like a psych band, just some older blokes. After all, Saloman is on the other side of 70. “I hope it doesn’t take another 20 years to come back,” he said sheepishly.
Most of us waited that long to hear the Bevis Frond wang, and yes, they did not disappoint. Some songs stretched long as the band improvised and built layer upon layer of guitar shred. While we didn't get anything that rivaled the legit epic "Homemade Traditional Electric Jam," the 42-minute capper to 2013's excellent White Numbers, each solo we did get smoked. But the Frond is just a firecracker of a band generally, playing this material with a pleasing looseness that made it sound like a proto-Dinosaur Jr. There was fuzz, and there were Nuggets-y hooks. Each song sort of sounded like a power pop descendent of The Open Mind's "Magic Potion," which the band covered during its first encore. That one shot through the crowd like a live wire. Perhaps it made everyone feel young again. Or maybe we were just happy to all be acting our ages.
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