AEM040 Verb the Adjective Noun

Verb the Adjec­tive Noun like crescen­dos. Lis­ten­ing to their EPs (avail­able for free at the adorably named www.welikeyoualot.com) brought to mind my first time hear­ing fel­low folk-rock scream­ers Okkervil River. Each song (with the excep­tion of Ampeater A-side “Made­line” which is a born power-pop sin­gle if I’ve ever heard one) begins with some­thing non­de­script: a few sim­ple strummed chords or a gen­tle fin­ger­pick­ing riff. The verse melodies tend to be pleas­ant but not aggres­sive. They flow by eas­ily at first, usu­ally tak­ing a detour through a catchy, relaxed instru­men­tal inter­lude and then some­how, by the end of each track, som­er­sault­ing into an absolutely cathar­tic explo­sion, car­ried by the worn out, raw vocals: usu­ally a creaky bari­tone dou­bled in octaves by an expres­sive, qua­v­ery sec­ond voice (actu­ally at the cli­maxes Verb the Adjec­tive Noun tend to just f*ckin’ go for it and over­dub about 100 vocal tracks, but these two are the most promi­nent; check out the cho­rus of “Made­line” for an exam­ple). The effect calls to mind another Boston native who spe­cial­izes in weav­ing the sim­plest melodies and har­monies into gold, Tim Howard of Soltero.

You may be won­der­ing why I haven’t iden­ti­fied these vocal­ists or even song­writ­ers by name. Well, the thing is, the band has such a cheery com­mu­nity per­sona that you’d prob­a­bly have to trek out to LA and see them live to even find out who’s singing each song (the singers have seri­ously dis­tinc­tive voices but I have no idea which band mem­bers they are). When I con­tacted them to ask about an Ampeater sin­gle my extremely friendly, exclamation-happy cor­re­spon­dent neglected to even sign the emails with any­thing but “Verb”. I guess it’s pos­si­ble that they answer emails col­lec­tively (the image of five dudes clus­tered around a lap­top argu­ing about whether to close the email with “rad­i­cal!” or “awe­some!” is almost irre­sistible), but really what this means is that this is a band, not some col­lec­tion of dudes bid­ing their time before they can launch their own solo projects. This spirit is cru­cial to any band that has mul­ti­ple song­writ­ers. There’s always the dan­ger in such sit­u­a­tions that the per­son­al­i­ties of the front­men can diverge so vio­lently that it’s like lis­ten­ing to two dif­fer­ent bands, but Verb puts up a con­sis­tently uni­fied front. If the seams are there, they’ve been spack­led over with pre­ci­sion, and the result­ing music has that per­fect band chem­istry that man­ages to bring out the strengths of each mem­ber and keep any indul­gences in check.

Verb the Adjec­tive Noun formed in early 2008 as a trio com­posed of song­writ­ers Shay Spence, Alexan­der Krispin, and Luc Lau­rent, and recorded their debut EP Novella in a church in the sum­mer of 2008. They fol­lowed it up in Decem­ber with Reds, from which these two songs are culled, adding Wayne Whit­taker and James Book­ert to the live band to fill out the incred­i­bly expan­sive sound of tracks like “Made­line” with its tolling bells and boom­ing drums. The enor­mity of the drum sound on this track can­not be over­stated. It sounds like the drums on The Soft Bul­letin, like some­one beat­ing on plan­ets with columns of fire.

As I men­tioned above, “Made­line” has has all the marks of a song that mag­i­cally descended from above and poured out of some lucky dude’s gui­tar per­fectly intact, like Athena leap­ing out of Zeus’s head. You can always tell when you hear these songs. They’re the kind that come into exis­tence effort­lessly, and you know that when the song­writer fin­ished them and sat back for a sec­ond, he thought “whoa, what just hap­pened?” Like all great pop songs, it has that mys­te­ri­ous whole that is so much more than the sum of its melodic and har­monic parts, which, as per Verb the Adjec­tive Noun’s mis­sion state­ment, are all “sim­plic­ity and raw energy.” The cho­rus itself is just pure, gooey, pop joy, but the more you lis­ten to the song the more you begin to see how every­thing else is per­fectly placed: the bell sounds dur­ing the breaks that just crack the song wide open, the switch of the cho­rus drum feel right at the word “Made­line”, the break­down and huge crescendo just when you thought the song was over (an old trick, but there’s a rea­son it’s still around: it works), the shiv­ery, tense gui­tar solo that man­ages to be just totally nat­u­rally weird (like, Jeff Tweedy on painkillers weird) with­out dis­turb­ing the essen­tial pop core of the song. Another layer leaps out with every listen.

B-side “Oh! Cat­a­stro­phe,” despite its trendily placed excla­ma­tion point, brings the folk rock ori­gins of the band more to the fore. The lyrics con­cern what seems to be a nas­tily failed rela­tion­ship that cul­mi­nates in the nar­ra­tor burn­ing down his apart­ment (take my every­thing / leave me smol­der­ing). It hinges on that semi-secret rela­tion­ship between dis­as­ter and free­dom, in which a cer­tain joy­ful lib­er­a­tion comes from los­ing every­thing you have in a trau­matic and sud­den way. The music is slow build set to a lop­ing 6/8, filled out by a shim­mer­ing organ and what sounds like a vibra­phone, both metal­lic, light sounds that seem to mir­ror the lyri­cal fire. The vocals pull back hard on the time, shiv­er­ing with emo­tion at the ends of lines, and build­ing up through an organ led instru­men­tal break and into the big cathar­sis of the last cho­rus, where the song leaps to the minor four, always a good move for a cli­max, and the vocals howl “do your worst to me” over and over with an energy that could be either despair or ela­tion. It’s way too risky to be cool, and there’s some­thing to be said for that.

Verb the Adjec­tive Noun is still a young band, and you can be sure that their sound is still devel­op­ing, push­ing against the energy bound­aries of acoustic instru­ments (the vol­ume dif­fer­ence between the two EPs is dra­matic) and per­haps towards the sound laid out in power pop tracks like “Made­line.” Still, no mat­ter what direc­tion they head in, you can be sure that the richly beat­ing hearts behind their dynamic early work will keep sim­plic­ity, energy and warm, breath­ing human­ity at the core of their songs.

Gabe Birn­baum

Side A — Madeline Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Oh! Catastrophe Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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