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CHICAGO – Union Station here is effectively a gigantic stone cavern: enormous, hard-surfaced, and blessed with reverb that seems to tiptoe all the way around the room before it slaps you in the back of the head. So a lot of the acts who played at tonight's Station to Station event figured out how to use the mammoth presence of the room to their advantage, beginning with No Age, who traded the high-volume art-punk of their earlier sets on the tour for a hushed, tense, constantly evolving wave of instrumental drone that began with a couple of their associates playing a slap-and-clap game in front of their microphone.
As No Age's performance ebbed away into silence again, it overlapped with a very different sound that started up on the balcony: the Rich South High School Marching Band – a smartly uniformed Chicago ensemble (with sparkly baton twirlers) who marched on down to the main floor and treated everyone to a bit of Justin Timberlake's "Suit & Tie." They were loud, they echoed like crazy, and they somehow managed to keep their beat crisp. Both White Mystery and the Thurston Moore/John Moloney duo Caught On Tape, who followed them, treated Union Station's acoustics as a weapon, cranking up the volume all the way and leaving it to the audience to pull flashes of melody out of the reverberating noise. (The latter, in fact, revisited Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia.")
The Black Monks of Mississippi, on the other hand, brought the volume way down as they took the stage with a haunting, skeletal version of Bob Marley's "Rastaman Chant." Accompanied by touches of cello, standup bass and faintly tapped drums, they sang in extraordinary, aching harmony while the video projections behind them showed dizzying footage from a camera climbing the side of a skyscraper at nightfall. When the Black Monks' performance shifted to an extended, near-wordless gospel moan, it felt like a premonition of the Rapture.
Following a jolting performance-poetry piece by + (pronounced "plus sign"), dedicated to "everyone quitting drugs," it was time for 74-year-old Mavis Staples, who's got more than six decades of experience in making her commanding contralto fit the room, and in knocking audiences flat. Her set leaned heavily on songs from this year's One True Vine – Funkadelic's "Can You Get to That," Low's "Holy Ghost," her high-friction remake of the Staple Singers oldie "I Like the Things About Me" – but also featured a spirited take on the Band's "The Weight" (for which her backup singers pitched in with a few verses) and an extended performance of the Staples' classic "Freedom Highway." And, as her group headed backstage, members of No Age and the Black Monks of Mississippi reappeared on the balcony to serenade the audience out.
All photos: Kendrick Brinson/WIRED
