Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Soft sell
Tiger Saw’s quiet music for swelling hearts
_BY CAMILLE DODERO

You know the indie-spectator stance: arms folded, beer tightly clasped, eyes narrowed in perma-skeptic stare. Tiger Saw cut through that shit. Like on New Year’s Eve at P.A.’s Lounge, when lead Sawman Dylan Metrano winds up the Newburyport collective’s late-evening set with the choral road ode "Postcards & Letters" by gently beckoning the audience to sing "Home is never really that far/Keep a song with you wherever you are.’" As this seven-piece incarnation of Tiger Saw echoes these lines, plodding forth at the slug-tempo’d pace of 50 bpm, a sleepaway-camp-style sing-along spreads through the room. Even a couple of woolly-hatted kids in the back who’d been murmuring together hush themselves and belt it out, "Home is never really that far . . . " You half-expect someone to flip the switch on a fake fireplace hidden behind the drum set — this is some serious log-burning, cockle-warming stuff.

With their banjo-tramping traveling songs, their Carter Family slowcore, and their whispery serenades, Tiger Saw make quiet music for swelling hearts. New Year’s was their 110th show of 2005. It’s not a record: in 2004, they played 129. These aren’t just run-of-the-mill club performances, either. Last June they did a pirate-radio-station benefit where they dragged their equipment onto the floor and headlined the Central Square VFW without a PA. And in general they tend to play venues that’re as lo-fi as their aural approach: movie theaters, coffeeshops, houses, beach bonfires, a boat floating in the Merrimack River. "As we just tried more and more things, I really gravitated to art spaces, all-ages shows, house shows, spaces where softer music would be appreciated and not engulfed by bar noise," Metrano explains. Once they even climbed into some trees and performed an acoustic set from the branches. "People would be walking by and the trees would be singing."

Sing! isn’t just the emphatic title of Tiger Saw’s third and most recent full-length on Kimchee Records, it’s also the rotating-member-band’s manifesto. If Metrano saw a poltergeist, he’d tiptoe to his guitar, sidle up beside the specter, and invite him to join in. On Sing!’s celebratory title track, a glee-clubbed paean that suggests a ghetto Polyphonic Spree, Metrano pledges that he’ll sing "everything I feel," "what our hearts understand," and "when speaking fails." To him, music is the ultimate shorthand, an unfailing amulet, the only abiding treaty.

Metrano writes about these feelings. He writes about friends. Smiles. Kisses. Trees. Family. The sun. The sea. Simple symbols of community, love, and life. "There’s nothing hidden in the language. For me, it’s actually really direct and simple; that’s the way that I can communicate the best." He does so without irony, self-righteousness, or pretension. "When we were recording ["The Sun" from Sing!], I’d left my notebook at home and I called my friend Nikole back home, and I was like, ‘I forgot the lyrics to this song. Can you read them to me over the phone?’ . . . She was reading, ‘Touch her face, kiss her softly/Call her sweetheart and be so happy,’ and it was just so embarrassing. I was like, ‘I don’t know? That’s just what I wrote.’ "

Metrano started the project six years ago, after he’d split from his high-school band Hamlet Idiot, an indie-rock outfit "all about youthful enthusiasm" who recorded with Steve Albini in 1995. In California, where Hamlet Idiot broke up, Metrano scribbled mopy tunes, recorded on a four-track, and sent tapes to musician friends. And so over the years, Tiger Saw have consisted of any number of 40 different contributors; 14 musicians appear on Sing!, including K Records’ Jason Anderson (a/k/a Wolf Colonel) and vocalist/pianist Casey Dienel, a Scituate native whose first record, Wind-Up Canary, hits stores in March courtesy of Hush Records, the Oregon label that first put out the Decemberists.

Metrano promoted New Year’s Eve as a "special night" because it would be the last outing of what he’d dubbed the "orchestral" version of Tiger Saw. Nat Baldwin, a vocalist/upright-bassist with an eight-song EP on Broken Sparrow, would soon be leaving for an East Coast tour. Electric-bassist Sam Rosen would be heading out with him in support of his own project. Dienel just relocated to Brooklyn. And so Metrano envisioned Tiger Saw’s next live phase as various combinations of frequent collaborators/members: Juliet Nelson, a buttery-voiced cellist whose lilting higher-range harmonies play Mimi Parker to Metrano’s Alan Sparhawk; drummer Gregg Porter (also in Hotel Alexis and Unbunny); a slide-guitarist/banjo plucker who’s listed in Sing!’s credits as blindbanjodjim.

Sometimes on tour, Tiger Saw is just Metrano. And that’s fine with him. Most important, though, is making a Tiger Saw show one of the few places where a rec-room chorus of kids intoning the refrain "Oh, we have everything" (a proclamation from Sing!’s "For Adrian") isn’t a spectacularly and selfishly American encomium to Manifest Destiny but a disarmingly gracious and gentle hymn about community. "Having those amazing nights in your living room, people huddled around, sitting on the edges of couches, and there’s a little bowl where you can put a donation on your way out. I just want shows to be special and be about the songs and that shared experience. And not just, ‘Hey, we’re opening up for Roddy Steamroller — whatever his name is.’ [That would be cock-rock joke Robby Roadsteamer.] I don’t want to be just a part of someone’s night out." He also wants people to sing.

Tiger Saw + The Blind King + Hilken Mancini | Lizard Lounge, 1667 Mass Ave, Cambridge | Jan 14 | 617.547.0759


Issue Date: January 13 - 19, 2006
Click here for the Cellars by Starlight archive
Back to the Music table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group