The Wedding Present – Seaport 2010 [uncut#15]

Posted in Unartig uncut by unartignyc on 2013/06/08

New York City, Seaport Music Festival 13 August 2010
Set List ~ Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft > Corduroy > Deer Caught In The Head Lights > You’re Dead > Brassneck > Crushed > No > Thanks > Kennedy > What Have I Said Now? > Granadaland > Bewitched > Take Me > Be Honest

Geek Specs
A/V ~ Sony HVR-Z5U with Sennheiser MKH418S M/S Stereo Shotgun Microphone > 1080i/60 HDV on Panasonic AY-DVM63PQUS > Sony GV-HD700 > Firewire > Final Cut Pro 7 > H.264, 1280×720, 24fps, 8000kbps, AAC, 44kHz, 320kbps

Words by Greg Peterson
If it came down to one thing, it was the sound of the guitars that caught my ear; the way they kept getting louder and more distorted and yet somehow still more melodic. They were doing a cover of Elton John’s “Step Into Christmas” on a compilation called A Lump Of Coal when I first heard The Wedding Present. It was probably in November of 1992. I was lucky that a few weeks later the one music store in town had a copy of their cassette Seamonsters, and about two minutes and forty five seconds into the first song, “Dalliance,” when the guitars and drums explode out of nowhere, it felt like my brain was exploding too. I had a new favorite band.

Up until then, I wanted to play guitar like Peter Buck. But here was a sound I had never imagined before. The distortion was so rich and full of character and unpredictable, like the midwestern thunderstorms that turn everything yellow before they come crashing down. The singer had a voice that sounded to me at the time a little bit like a sarcastic frog with a broken heart, and even if I couldn’t understand half of the words, I could feel his pain (pretty much all of the songs are about betrayal, in one way or another). The sound of the album (my first taste of Albini) was completely addictive: the manic strumming, the huge propulsive drums, the catchy and melancholy melodies, and the chord changes that felt like your heart had stopped. . . eventually this would be one of the few albums that I owned on cassette, CD, and LP.

The guitarist Peter Solowka left the band pretty much as I was discovering them, but the sounds he made still take me right back to my white Dodge Horizon with the tiny speakers pushed to their limit, driving into the mysterious adult world that apparently existed just beyond high school.

Brassneck