Tonight, Mississippi Studios is hosting the CD release show for Portland favorites, Hello Morning. Fellow indie outfit The Dimes warms up the audience, followed by Steve Taylor (of Rogue Wave fame) up from Oakland. Once the pump is nicely primed, Hello Morning takes to the stage to play numbers off their latest album, A Fiction.
These guys are all clearly longtime music scene pros. Each member of the band plays with a self-contained confidence which might come across as cocky if it didn’t weave so seamlessly with the rest of ‘em. Shake these intensely individual individuals all together and stick ‘em up on stage and you get this high-energy cocktail, a mix of melodic ballad vocals (as in the track “Letters”), anthem rock refrains (“Lucky One”), and heavy-beat guitar on guitar interplay (uhmm . . . every single song they play live). It’s impossible not to get flashes of old-school Bono and U2 when listening to these guys — even more so live than recorded — what with the hard floating vocals and twisty chords. Watching them too: their stage performance has that heel-to-toe rocking, taut-muscled energy that makes the most of deliberate discord and allows the members to play off each other with a synergetic, crowd-pleasing intensity.
The varying pace and range of Hello Morning’s numbers is more apparent recorded, especially on this latest album (a copy of which everyone received free at the door for the Mississippi Studios show — suhweet! — though if you missed it you can download music on their official site). Live, these guys ramp up and up, amping each other’s physical motion and playing until the whole stage is consumed with a balls to the wall commitment to what they’re doing. Warning: if you’re not as a general rule completely swept up in this style of indie rockin’, when viewed live it can come across as slightly monochromatic, with the high-octane energy displacing some of the nuance of the recorded offerings. It’s a trade-off, yo. Two totally different experiences.
So if Hello Morning strikes yer fancy, you know to buy the CD and catch them playing at your local.
(Mississippi Studios, March 4, 2011, Portland, Oregon)
