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Live Review Sample
ContraStance at the Paradise It's one thing for a band to conceive of searing songs and pull out every stop in the studio to craft them. It's another thing for that band to achieve a level of technical mastery that allows them to evoke their vision live. Enter ContraStance. The show Saturday December 14th at The Paradise, in Boston proved that true originality may demand irreverence, and in capable hands, the experience is stunning. Based out of Revere, Massachusetts, the four guys in ContraStance showed the ease inspired by being a local favorite in rare performance on a home stage. They began the set with "Action Figures on Parade," a song that left the bartenders a bit lonely as much of the booze-swilling crowd squeezed onto the floor to see this vigorous and visual song unfold like a narrative gyroscope. Tonight "Action Figures on Parade" showed most clearly how collaboration and alchemy remain ContraStance's lodestone as in few other bands. Each player presents deliberate and inventive musical phrases - there is no noodling here. The effect is coherence, and it plays not like an orgy of egos, but like a communion of superheroes committed to the cause. "Blue" highlights the expressive playing of bassist Tanner Hayden. The song strides along with melodic lyricism that propels it to a dynamic finish for which the audience showed raucous appreciation. The crowd's familiarity with even the new songs didn't tempt the band into standing in a corner of assured territory. Improv was afoot, most notably in "Stereo B" and "Phosphorous." ContraStance consistently manages to bridge different musical influences in a way that doesn't sound derivative. Some listeners might hear Brand X for an instant, or the briefest channeling of Weather Report, but such similarities flare into something wholly original before the shout-out becomes imitative. All that is hardly relevant, however, because listening to ContraStance, you'll be reeling or reveling, and looking forward to more shows and nights like this one they men from Revere pulled out. © Cesca Janece Waterfield Back
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