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Wild Flag: Resuscitating Rock And Roll One Chord At A Time

By Kim Bellware in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 6, 2012 4:20PM

Wild Flag blew the doors off Metro last night during their 90-minute set partly out of skill, but also out of necessity. While the bar was set high--melt every single face in the room--anything less would have been unacceptable.

Of course, Wild Flag was never in any real danger of sucking; their combined (roughly) 80 years of experience and excellent resume of no-bullshit, hard rocking music made lame action all but a statistical impossibility. The real liability was sounding like a sampler platter of all their previous bands. Their prior efforts in Sleater-Kinney, Helium and The Minders were strong, and the crowd might not have even minded if the women had hauled out their "original indie rock" best, dusted it off and presented that as "Wild Flag."

But the group has too much integrity to pull a stunt like that, and doing so would have undercut the whole reason the band formed. Wild Flag made a big splash and an even bigger statement with last year's self-titled debut because it was the sound of a line being drawn in the musical sand. Brownstein, the most visible of group thanks roles in both Sleater-Kinney and Portlandia and her NPR Monitor Mix blog, had written as early as 2009 that rock music had noticeably shifted, and what it had become, frankly, sucked. If the prevailing trend in rock was music that held your hand and brushed the bangs from your face, Wild Flag wanted to be the music that pulled your hair and lustily bit you on the neck.

Thursday night, the band jumped into their set without any braggadocio, just muscular, fiery intensity. With so many fast-moving pieces it was dizzying to latch on to just one: the tight harmonies, the blistering guitar licks and oh yeah Janet Weiss on drums. And with several of Wild Flag's songs reaching the six, seven and eight minute marks, the arrangements had space to unfold, take over and then retreat.

Brownstein and Mary Timony's shared front woman duties are good example of this. Each has a distinctly different vocal style--Timony is moody and silky while Brownstein is angular and raw--but together they make sparks fly on song like "Romance," whose pull is wound by the dynamic of girlish, aggressive and erotic tension. Both take turns with the guitar solos, but even there, as with "Glass Tambourine," Brownstein's locomotive rhythm is contrasted with Timony's dart-precice noodling.

With so much happening vocally and on guitars, it's hard to image how much more the band packs in. We would call Weiss the band's secret weapon, except there's absolutely nothing secret about her. People have agreed for years that Weiss is an incomparable drummer, but it's still worth noting that she could put on a clinic for every other percussionist beating a tattoo right now. Weiss' drumming is more than kinesthetic, it's downright emotional (and not just because her power makes it impossible to distinguish your own heartbeat from her rhythm).

Rebecca Cole, perhaps the least-known member of the group and with the most easy to overlook instrument (organ) didn't exactly chew the aural scenery. She couldn't vamp from behind the organ like Brownstein and Timony or crush the room like Weiss, but without her, Wild Flag would have none of the urgent, anxious and dangerous feel that crept through songs like "Future Crimes."

The foursome lined up and knocked down nearly every song from their album, and brought out newer tracks like the punk salvo "Winter Pair." The encore, however, would have alone been more than worth the price of admission. A blindingly good cover of Television's "See No Evil" was followed by Bobby Freeman's "Do You Wanna Dance" (made famous twice-over from covers by The Beach Boys and later The Ramones). The Freeman number was an especially fun highlight, bringing out the best in Wild Flag's girl group sound--as if the Shangri-Las got mixed up in the '60s Seattle garage rock scene of The Sonics. The four song encore ended with Fugazi's "Margin Walker" causing the entire audience to, predictably, lose its shit.

Wild Flag went beyond proving they aren't a nostalgia act eager to re-hash the '90s sound that made them punk, rock and indie heroes. In making rock and roll for 2012, they've taken cues from the best of punk, garage rock and indie rock and forgot the crap that accumulated in the early aughts. We'd argue Wild Flag is the most authoritative band in rock right now, and they thankfully still know how to have a good time. Watching Brownstein windmill, half duck walk-half choogle or Timony vamp like a hair metal rock goddess, is impossibly fun.

Near the end of the set, Brownstein tried to console the crowd over the Cubs' opening day loss. After some Cubs vs. Sox banter, she concluded, "Chicago, you're so smiley and cute." But Brownstein of all people knows that for her band and its fans, smiley and cute could be considered damming words. Before she tore in to the next song she was sure to add, "But you're also handsome. And tough."