Frog Eyes w/ Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band and Typhoon

On the night of its end, LOST wasn’t even mentioned—and not because no one was prepared to deal with inevitable, crushing disappointment. The night had a lot to live up to after all: first opener Typhoon was recently crowned the #2 best new Portland band by the Willamette Week; headliner Frog Eyes just put out one of the best records of the year and easily the most accessible and enjoyable thing Carey Mercer’s ever done; the Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band is called that. But with little aplomb and a decent-sized audience, the unassumingly stacked line-up made good on whatever it was they were supposed to make—be it critical accolades, sincerely jejune noise, or singlehandedly representing the communally-minded folk pop that seems to be populating and destroying old houses in Portland’s SE. (Maybe you can play a mean mandolin, you’re sure as shit not going to get that deposit back.)

Typhoon crammed twelve people on stage—two drummers, one odds-n-ends percussionist, trumpet, trombone, fiddles, and so on, all of them playing drums at some point, even if they were already playing a drum—but wound down a half hour through an efficient, blue-collared set of vaguely roots-oriented alt-country, like Califone if Califone made the terrible mistake of moving to Indianapolis and buying a bungalow with a big porch next to the freeway. In other words: I know it’s tempting to assemble a band around an idea of community and populist ideals about creating art, but for every chump friend you recruit—or, as is usually the case: allow—that’s one more step away from the prospect of intimacy and two more from a financially viable tour outside the Pacific Northwest. I enjoyed Typhoon, I did; I’m just not sure the extra six bodies were doing them any favors.

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band, in turn, seemed slight, casual, a bit deranged even. Their psych-dribbled jams, at once meandering and terse, splayed out seething and sticky against the Holocene’s bone-shaded walls. Here they loosened the previous band’s regimented sound and stared weirdly into space for long stretches of time, which somehow felt like a logical precursor to Frog Eyes. I imagined alien bulb-shaped flora spitting—just shy of erotically—dense spore clouds into the thick of the audience; I was drinking a lot of gin. This is only made weirder in retrospect when I learned that their drummer, Marshall Verdoes, is 15 years old. I suddenly, just now as I read that, on Twitter coincidentally and unfortunately, feel very self-conscious.

And anyway, from that point on Frog Eyes entered to perform phenomenally well and perform most of the songs I’d hoped they’d perform, plus one unexpected cut from Mercer’s solo joint (“Biloxi, In a Grove, Cleans Out His Eyes” all hurried and bleeding…um, moreso) and, at night’s end, on a Sunday when most other people I know and kinda love were watching LOST, there was me feeling completely fulfilled by a small musical experience that unfurled as wholly as I could, and did, expect. That Mercer was getting over or getting into a sickness, hacking wet lung spunk from his throat into his clenched teeth between songs, and could still sing as dynamically as his every recording testifies—and make no mistake: Mercer sings; he can hold one wrenching note loudly and purely after another, scaling seemingly insurmountable songs via his tiny wiggling screech-hole—this was a spectacle. A simple, inexpensive, ravishing kind of spectacle on a Sunday when most people I know and kinda love were watching another kind of spectacle—one without so many drummers.