By Josh Hughes
This Wednesday, Oct. 25, the Underground will continue their Wednesday Night Concert Series with a performance by Bellingham veterans The Dawn Bombs and Seattle avant-garde jazz duo Bad Luck at 7 p.m. A curious combo, the bands will play for free for a two hour set of jangly guitar pop and saxophone experimentation, respectively.
Made up of singer and guitarist Ben Waight, bassist Ruben Gomez, and drummer Will Luckensmeyer, The Dawn Bombs have been around since their early days at Western in 2015. After having played last year’s BAMF! festival, Western’s “battle of the bands” competition for Lawnstock and numerous shows at the Underground, the trio have created a wide audience in their two years as a unique act in the Bellingham scene.
“If you took three jazz musicians steeped in Vampire Weekend’s off kilter psych pop along with Local Natives alternative indie rock, you might get close to Bellingham’s The Dawn Bombs,” reads the band’s own excellently designed website, https://www.thedawnbombs.com/#home-section. While they may wear their influences on their sleeve, it’d be a difficult endeavor to find a more fitting description of the band’s sound. There’s some doowop in there, and even a bit of ska and reggae that seeps in at the corners of their sound, but ultimately, The Dawn Bombs write catchy pop music that feels timeless.
While they only have one EP to their name as of now, Greetings From… does an excellent job of defining the band’s precise, groovy dynamic. “Monde Rose” shuffles through a ballroom march while Waight’s voice fluctuates between the lows of his range and that sweet spot that Local Natives’ Kelcey Ayer hits regularly. “Acetylene” threatens to burst apart at the seams at any given moment, but always smooths back out into its mathematical guitar lick. Waight delicately hums “find me crooning in my corner of the world,” an appropriate sentiment for such a beloved Bellingham band.
Bad Luck, on the other side of the spectrum, are quite a longshot from clever indie rock. The duo, comprised of saxophonist Neil Welch and drummer Chris Icasiano, have been writing and improvising gritty jazz in the corners of Seattle, Anacortes and Bellingham for the last ten years.
After three albums and an EP to their name, Bad Luck have a formula down that still sounds like utterly nothing else in contemporary music. Colin Stetson, The Kandinsky Effect and The Bad Plus seem like the closest reference points, but the duo craft a musical niche that no one else really occupies. Since their sound revolves around nothing but saxophone and drums (and the occasional electronics), Welch and Icasiano play off of each other so closely and tightly that it can be easy to forget that much of their music is improvised.
Formed at University of Washington during late night drum and sax sessions indebted to John Coltrane, Bad Luck took jazz standards as a starting point to their now meticulous performative art. In 2012, the New York Jazz Review named their record Two album of the year, and the duo are heralded throughout the modern jazz scene in the country, even though they still remain outsiders.
Their tracks meander in and out of raw, angular bursts of energy and lulling ambience that pulls the listener into a trance. When they break a groove they’ve been sculpting over an eight minute piece, whatever they next shift into remains just as compelling. Jarring transitions become moments of transcendence, and there’s always a sense that the band members themselves are experiencing equally as new of a feeling as the listener. While they’ll certainly pull songs from their previous releases at the Underground, expect an aural burst of improvisation and intricate musicianship.
The Wednesday Night concert series runs throughout the entire quarter, continuing next week with Porch Cat and Black Radish.