Umm ... Drop

MUSIC

Circles

By Doug Wallen

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted May. 28, 2008

photo by michael persico

A few years back the fledgling label Brown Brothers released Gold Sounds, an album on which a studied jazz quartet tackled Pavement songs. It was a swell way to hear the iconic indie band's balance of pervasive quirks and meandering melodies without so much shaggy-dog underachieving.

Rather than sounding like jazzmen playing Pavement, the Philly foursome Circles sound sort of like Pavement playing jazz. There's seedy country in there too--especially in frontman Nick Millevoi's rambling delivery--and the band's bio cites "Hank Williams, Albert Ayler, roots, percussion and the pentatonic scale" as key influences. But Circles fall apart and rattle around as if they were a jazz band trying to squeeze onto the bill at a warehouse noise show.

Maybe it's the blurts of trombone issued by Sonic Liberation Front's Dan Blacksberg on Circles' new album Weighs a Ton. Or maybe it's the fact that there are two drummers (Robert Ludington and Julius Masri), just like in Pavement.

In the end, though, figuring Circles out gets harder with each song. "Get Down!" surveys reggae before slinking off on a jam-y tangent, "Slow Death" devastatingly matches its title to a T, and "Creep Creep" goes from a march beat to a goofy rock gem that could almost pass for Eels.

Out on the Connecticut/Wisconsin label Wooden Man, Weighs a Ton is the follow-up to Circles' 2005 debut When the Big River Floods. Over the course of 10 shambling songs, the band loiters in alien intersections of free jazz, indie rock, country, punk and blues, leaving Millevoi's castoff storytelling to stitch things together.

Fri., May 30, 8pm.
$5.
With Notekillers, Soft People + Goes Cube.
Pi Lam, 3914 Spruce St.
www.myspace.com/thepilam

He succeeds most memorably on the opener "Steal for the Lord," a scoundrel's account of skirting religion while trying to make his father proud. It's a daffy little number that's as good an introduction as any to Circles' cryptic charms.