I’ve been a fan of Melissa Swingle’s music, first with Trailer Bride and now with The Moaners, since about 2000. I had never had the privilege of seeing her perform; I live out West, and a band of limited means from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, only rarely can afford the kind of cross-country tour that would bring it to my neighborhood. And usually when they do come through, they play only the bigger cities, on Monday or Tuesday nights to boot. So when I found out, thanks to Facebook, that The Moaners were coming to my little town of Corvallis, Oregon, on a Saturday night no less, I immediately nailed down the date. I invited a friend who had never heard of Swingle or The Moaners. We were technically on their guest list but the cover was only $5 for a three-band bill (with Minnesota singer-songwriter David Dondero the headliner), so we both pungled up to help support independent music.
The Moaners comprise Swingle on guitar and vocals and occasional saw, and Laura King on drums and occasional guitar and vocals. Their first two albums Dark Snack (Yep Roc) and Blackwing Yalobusha (Yep Roc, 2007) are fairly raucous, rocking albums, with Swingle drawling her Southern Gothic lyrics about relationships gone bad and other travails of modern times over her greasy, swampy, distorted electric guitar riffs and King’s powerful drumming. Their most recent, 2010′s Nocturnal (Holidays For Quince) is generally a more relaxed, even folky record, that I confess I have not yet fully digested.
The venue was a coffeehouse called Interzone that I’d never thought of as a rock venue, although apparently they’ve been hosting live music for 10 years. When my friend and I arrived, Swingle and King were sitting in their van parked on the street out front. I introduced myself and asked Laura, who was in the driver’s seat, if the van was their green room for the night. “Yeah, we’re just hanging out … we had no idea,” she said. I’m sure the rock duo has endured worse, sadly. The performance space was a slightly raised nook of the coffehouse, about 20 feet square with a bare concrete floor.
The openers were a local band Abolitionist. The local kids were all out for them and seemed to enjoy them. Swingle and King were set up and took the stage at about 10 p.m., kicking off with “Terrier” from Dark Snack. It’s a darkly hilarious put-down of a male suitor whom she compares to a persistent little dog and admonishes “get off my leg” and “I’ll kick you if you bite me again.” During the verses she sang over a series of barre chords on her guitar (one of three in different open tunings with the top strings tuned very low to make up for the absence of a bass); for the instrumental sections between verses she used one of her four pedals to start a loop of her chords and got creative with the slide. It was a tactic she used throughout the performance, which allowed her to fill out the sound and play something other than rhythmic riffs.
The rest of the 45-minute performance drew heavily from the first two albums, including “Monkey Tongue,” “Brainwash” and “I Think I Love You” from Yalobusha and “Hard Times” and “You Don’t Miss Your Water” from Dark Snack. I didn’t catch any from Nocturnal except for their closer, which I’m pretty sure was “Blue Moon (Cold Hard Stone)” on which Swingle played saw and sang and King played guitar. The remaining handful of songs were new to me. It was sometimes hard to make out the lyrics, even though I was directly in front of the speaker, due to the harsh acoustics.
For a two-piece band, The Moaners rocked hard and loud. Swingle deftly handled some heckling from one of the openers’ fans who thought he was hilariously ironic, and the slurred words of adoration from a very drunk fan who looked like a recent arrival from Armenia but claimed to be from South Carolina. And King, with her snare tuned ear-piercingly high, worked up a sweat behind the kit with drumming that did more than set a rhythm but also enhanced each song’s mood and lyrics. Together, their sound is raw and primal, like you’d expect to hear in some Delta juke joint, not a coffeehouse adjacent to a cow college campus. My friend bought all three of their CDs from the merch table, a ringing endorsement in my book.
I’m glad I finally got to see, and meet, The Moaners. I’ll be on hand the next time they pass through, you can depend on it. You can keep an eye on their tour dates at The Moaners Web site.
Gary Whitehouse
(Interzone Cafe, Corvallis, Oregon; Nov. 13, 2010)
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