By Brandon Bussolini
To borrow from writer Jessica Hopper, the nature of the Internet is to refer. Before I encountered San Francisco's Lazarus as a Web entity, I'd seen them open for Beach House at the Swedish American Hall and had met the band's vocalist-personality, Trevor Montgomery, a couple of times.
He's super-tall, not a giant but approximately when dressed in a too-small trenchcoat buttoned up all the way to the top as he was when I first met him through my friend Yoni. A long face with attenuated features, he's like a half-remembered Æon Flux character. The music I later heard Lazarus perform - the band started as a collab with Marty Anderson, but the lineup live and in the studio now includes Sacto natives Kelly Nyland and Kathryn Sechrist - was harrowing and gooey. Spacemen 3 can make opiate addiction sound like a religious experience. Lazarus, on the other hand, makes music where using, being broken down and waiting for redemption isn't any more attractive or transcendent than, like, a John Ford rewrite of Waiting for Godot.
This is where the referential part of MySpace comes in: the group has studded its profile with a constellation of literary visionaries/losers. There's the Comte de Lautréamont, Aleister Crowley, Dostoevsky, and even the irredeemably "profound" Charles Bukowski. Now, bands wearing their reading on their sleeve, much less pulling it off, is pretty rare - you have it with the Fall's Lovecraftian prole-weirdness, and Scritti Politti's Derridean luxury. On the other hand, you have your little brother's high school band, all amped on a cocktail of Tool and Palahniuk. This is a way of saying that if I'd visited the Lazarus MySpace before encountering the music, I might not have heard what I did: music that goes beyond - or stops short of, your call - the well-worn tropes of hard-livin', wide-travelin', unsavory-character-befriendin' rock.
Montgomery's disposition is like Leonard Cohen's battered persona, but he's less willing to turn the camera on himself and engage in the sort of performative self-pity Cohen does. Montgomery's voice is weary and doesn't come out of the music so much as it stabs into it. A song like "The Sky of the Tall Sun" is much more Neon Bible (Merge, 2007) than New Skin for the Old Ceremony (Columbia, 1974), but I think I'd rather listen to its smudged junky vocal humps than "Black Wave"'s bien-pensant worry.
The cut of "Singing to the Thieves"' jib, from the earlier Like Trees We Grow up to Be Satellites (Something in Construction, 2005), also finds Lazarus nearly on the same page as Arcade Fire - this time drawing out a taste for Neutral Milk Hotel to fist-pumping ends. Go back even further, and find "Ocean (Burn the Highways)," which conveniently predates the Arcade Fire and also steps out of the Canadian combo's shadow to enter, perversely, post-grunge's. It proves what Current 93's David Tibet has long known: Gollum vocals will improve almost any song with acoustic guitar.
Stepping back from the Internet to rely again on memory, though, I find Lazarus cuts a figure that still doesn't square up to their less-formidable digital presence. Beyond the fact that it snagged its name before Nick Cave got around to it, the outfit has a way of flickering in and out live that gets lost with too much context. Must be the wrong kind of context: Lazarus' net effect is literary, but has more in common with dirty-faced "realists" like Ford than it does with Bukowski's asshole epiphanies.
LAZARUS
With Physics of Meaning and Colossal Yes
Sun/22, 9 p.m., $6
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
(415) 923-0923
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