Breezy Days Band

Hemlock Tavern, Jan. 13

By Gabriel Mindel

a&eletters@sfbg.com

LOCAL LIVE Performers often reflect their audience's desires in the form of larger-than-life fantasy. What's more interesting is when someone shows their talents on a more human scale. This would at least partially explain why the Breezy Days Band had the packed Hemlock back room in the palm of their hands.

They walk a strange line, somewhere between genius and utter amateurishness. It's obvious that their peculiar pop tunes are well crafted, yet in execution, their music is accident-prone and precarious.

This isn't entirely unintentional. Yasi Perera, BDB's drummer and occasional vocalist, writes the songs on guitar and then sends them as tablature by e-mail to bandmates over e-mail (for this show, guitarists Lyal Michael and Will Sherwin). The pieces are intended to be played in perfect synchronicity, but there is an element of inevitable disaster worked in. Rhythms are imperfectly inferred, and the fingering is at times nearly impossible for even the most practiced musicians. The result is a curiously familiar pop assemblage, filled with complex and articulated streams of notes and deceptively simple runs of garage riffing, country strum, and, of all things, boogie-woogie.

Truthfully, BDB's music is not completely foreign: Its obvious predecessor is Captain Beefheart's band; its peers, Et At It and the Curtains. Yet the BDB's live performances are uniquely mesmerizing, especially the enigmatic and energetic presence of Perera. Wild-eyed and smiling, he has a little-kid-meets-mad-scientist quality that can make his playing and gestures seem both naive and brilliant. At one point Perera leapt up from his drum kit, clutching for the microphone, and then paused to turn down the guitar amp next to him. When he repeated this gesture, it became a supreme act of antirock, and one so profound that it sent all presumptions about Perera into a whirlwind. Who does such a thing?

Positioned at stage right during BDB's performance was singer-songwriter Jessica LaFlamme. She recently ended her role as a guitarist for BDB, and she sang her own subtle and unconventional pop pieces in a song-for-song trade-off with BDB. Written with a nod to jazz and rural American styles of yore, LaFlamme played with a stylized flair that, while very much her own, blended almost seamlessly with BDB's sounds. At times it seemed as though they were one band.

LaFlamme shared more than just musical similarities with her stage companions. She too fluttered abruptly between canny songwriting and amateurish performance. Pausing on chords, stopping midsong, and swallowing the occasional lyric, LaFlamme wasn't exactly a highly polished performer. Yet her obvious talent and beautiful voice held her audience captive, and they seemed almost to yearn for her to succeed. At one point a woman described the vocalist as "precious," but this was hardly appropriate. Singing "If you want to have fun with me, you have to cut your arms" in an absurdly childlike melody, LaFlamme evoked titters but left the room with a mild hangover of discomfort when the seriousness of the lyric settled in.

With the end of each song by BDB and LaFlamme came a cheer that suggested a sort of heroic act had taken place, and though it might have seemed condescending, it was sincerely offered. The audience held its breath hoping to see these unassuming and eccentric songwriters pull off a feat they knew was difficult and frightening, and while Perera, LaFlamme, and company were not unaware of their vulnerabilities, they also didn't hide them, and they showed a determination and heart that is as unironic as it gets. It made you believe that if you have your own genius tucked away safe and sad in a closet, you too could lay it bare; sitting in a room full of people silently pulling for these musicians, you easily dreamed yourself up there.