Wild Flag w/ Royal Baths & Kelli Schaefer

Kelli Schaefer’s drummer said what we were all quietly thinking amongst ourselves as her set at the beginning of the night came to an end: “Aren’t you curious to know what Wild Flag sounds like? I am.” Before last week, despite already being signed to Merge (a stretch from their Portland, Oregon and Washington, D.C. bases of operation and the two primary labels Sleater-Kinney released music through, Kill Rock Stars and Sub Pop) and having a sold-out run of shows down the west coast, virtually no one but Wild Flag had heard Wild Flag. We knew that Wild Flag existed, and we had reason to be excited, given its personnel—Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss, Helium’s Mary Timony, and Minders’ Rebecca Cole—but there was nothing else to go off of, just faith that whatever this personnel was interested in doing would be worth hearing.

Schaefer, herself a Portland musician, delivered a melodically strong set of songs that occasionally seemed as if they were looking to move into the territory Wild Flag wouldn’t explicitly be touching—Corin Tucker’s operatic soprano—atop fairly detailed, folk-oriented arrangements. Tour support Royal Baths also had going for them some fairly detailed guitar work; one of them even sounded remarkably like Jandek when he sang solo leads, something that I had to assume was at least partially intentional given how fucking weird it is to hear anyone who sounds like Jandek.

Wild Flag was pretty clearly the predominant draw, though, especially given that tickets had sold out for this tiny show weeks in advance solely based on the involved personnel, and despite this being their third performance, ever, they essentially delivered. The quartet performed a set of entirely new material, and it was clearly fresh; in addition to picking up setlists, people in the crowd were finding sheets detailing lyrics and chord changes for several of the songs played that night.

However, the thing most apparent from seeing Wild Flag is how overjoyed Carrie Brownstein is to be playing music again. After three years of doing just about everything else, and doing them not necessarily badly—her hiatus has seen her take on roles as a music blogger for NPR, a music historian with a forthcoming book to be published by HarperCollins, and a sketch comedian alongside Fred Armisen with a series developed for IFC—it’s clear that she’s most invested in the business of performing songs. While she and Mary Timony both front this band, and the songs weave in and out of both vocal and guitar leads from the two of them, Brownstein and Timony were almost opposite in stage presence. Timony appears stoic, working out detail after detail, knocking out tapped guitar leads so subtly that one had to really look hard to notice she was shredding when she wasn’t singing; Brownstein spent much of the set singing as hard as she possibly could, jumping up and down, kicking the air, engaging Timony in the dueling guitars thing, telling jokes, and repeatedly thanking the sold-out audience for coming to the band’s third-ever show.

That’s not to discredit the band’s rhythm section, either. Janet Weiss hasn’t taken time off like Brownstein has, heading straight from Sleater-Kinney to being a Jick for Stephen Malkmus, touring with Bright Eyes, and returning to Quasi with ex-husband Sam Coomes, but the chemistry of her and Brownstein together really creates something special. At times, Wild Flag’s music does sound like where Sleater-Kinney could have gone on a followup to final album The Woods (2005), now half a decade old; the explosive, psychedelic leads that drove that album’s most expansive moments haven’t been ignored, nor has their old band’s smart aggression. While the sound system wasn’t good enough to give me a clear grasp on lyrics, I’m hugely looking forward to hearing these songs on a record—picking apart the intricacies of the guitar work, hearing Rebecca Cole’s piano work not buried by a low-frequency buzz that the band couldn’t get rid of for the entirety of their set, trying to figure out how the hell Janet Weiss pulls off the fills she seems to so effortlessly knock out on everything.

If anything marks the fact that Brownstein was having a complete and total fucking blast being on stage again, though, it was the band’s encore, where they covered the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden” (with a killer solo from Timony, of course) and Patti Smith’s “Ask the Angels,” for which Brownstein put down her guitar and was all Smith-style theatrics while Timony played Lenny Kaye’s parts.

I don’t know if I necessarily have that much better a grasp as to what Wild Flag sounds like than anyone else, having only heard their songs once, but I do know for sure that the ensemble is every bit as promising in practice as it was in theory. And that their forthcoming debut is easily one of my most anticipated of next year.