Pit Er Pat, Lazer Crystal, Aleks & the Drummer
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Most bands are easy to sum up: “church-burning black metal,” for instance, or “a lot like Interpol.” Trying to describe Aleks & the Drummer is like trying to describe a digital photo one pixel at a time–it’s hard to get across the whole picture without piling up a lot of information. First off, they’re a duo: Tomaszewska plays Farfisa organ and sings, and Deric Criss is the Drummer. They sound psychedelic, but not spacey or druggy or self-indulgent like a typical psych band. Criss favors Krautrock rhythms cranked up to punk-rock speeds, and Tomaszewska likes elaborate minor-key melodies and ethereal, abstract vocals. She often sings in nonsense syllables or her native Polish–they even cover an early-80s tune by the Polish pop band Bajm. I’m embarrassed to fall back on a threadbare music-crit device like the theoretical lineup, but for brevity’s sake let’s try this one: a Polish cabaret singer accompanying herself like a speed-freak Phantom of the Opera while Brendan Canty plays just the drum fills from Fugazi’s fast songs. That’s eight or nine more pixels right there.
When you can use words like emo or techno to describe a band, most people who’ve decided they aren’t into those things will tune out right away. But because Aleks & the Drummer don’t fit into one of those pigeonholes, it’s tougher for a crowd–even a crowd with very specific loyalties–to write them off sight unseen. And sure enough, their audience is as hard to peg as their music. The 20 or so shows they’ve played since debuting in May include an appearance at the Three Million Tongues festival–Steve Krakow tapped them to open for Burning Star Core, White/Lichens, and semilegendary strangeballs Smegma–and a rare live-band set at the Funky Buddha’s Outdanced night, where I saw a roomful of hip-hop heads and clubby hipsters go just as nuts for them as they would for a new Justice single. Last summer the duo played a neighborhood festival in Palmer Square as part of a lineup Criss describes as “a bunch of cover bands and funk bands.” (Tomaszewska is less charitable: “It was Caribbean cruise music.”) They had no idea how the crowd would react–it was mostly Mexican families–but they went over smashingly. “Some kids got up and started breakdancing,” Tomaszewska says. And on Monday they’re opening for Pit Er Pat on the last show of their residence at Schubas.
The “something sad” is Tomaszewska’s ghostly singing. Her organ lines fill out the sound impressively, sometimes adding a kitschy goth element to the songs, but her clear, slightly melancholy voice is what holds the music together. Even more so than the up-tempo songs on their MySpace page, much of the duo’s new material is furiously fast–without Tomaszewska’s ear for dramatic melodies, it’d probably end up sounding like a weird take on artsy, hypertechnical thrash, a la Hella, if it weren’t completely unlistenable. Instead what you get is a band that seems like the product of a Craigslist miscommunication that just happened to work out perfectly. It sounds bizarre when all you can do is read about it, but when you use your ears, it’s enchantingly gorgeous.
