High Life/Times

To start you off today, here’s a blurb by Andrew Miller on a really good local band. For various logistical reasons, it did not make it into print, so I posted it today because the show’s tomorrow night. — Ed.

Rock bands don’t need much of a reason to throw a party, and at first glance an EP release seems like a relatively flimsy excuse. EPs are to full-length records what previews are to feature films, and only the most obsessed moviegoers gather to witness a trailer’s debut. However, The Life and Times‘ The Magician justifies the fanfare, fitting more intriguing guitar effects into its twenty-two-minute frame than many bands boast in their entire discographies.

Allen Epley’s ax spits feedback fuzz, surges, and vanishes like quick-passing highway traffic, and then reverses its melodic flow as if someone started spinning the record backward to scan for Satanic messages. Chris Metcalf’s drums hiss and rattle during the verses, then detonate in conjunction with Eric Albert’s baleful basslines during pulsing wall-of-sound climaxes. Saturday night’s Record Bar show provides fans with perhaps the only opportunity to hear all five songs make the set list, because EP tracks tend to disappear on future tours. (For example, anyone remember hearing Shiner’s stellar cover of Bad Company’s “Feel Like Making Love,” which anchors 1999’s Making Love EP, at a post-2000 concert?)

Check out The Life and Times on Saturday, November 11, at the Record Bar, with the New Tragedies and Ghost in Light.