Live Review: Rings at Glasslands [1.20.08]

There are two kinds (well, at least two kinds) of abstraction: the kind that’s about attempting (and necessarily, beautifully failing) to represent an impossible ideal and the kind that’s about forcing you to interact with the strange "thingy-ness" of a thing. In visual art, we might say Mondrian is the former and Pollack is the latter; in music, we might say that Rings is the former and is the latter. On Sunday night at Brooklyn's Glasslands, Rings treated us to the good old abstract power of repetition and simplicity. Their delay-washed vocals, pounded drums, scraped guitar figures, and rolling keyboard lines pointed toward some Platonic pop heaven while at the same time remaining earthly and unstudied.

Rings are a New York trio born of the ashes of a band called First Nation. On stage there are two keyboards, a “drum kit,” two guitars, and some delay pedals for the vocals (including this really neat looking old-school one that seemed like it was an answering machine from the 80’s). The three women of the band each play nearly all of these instruments at one time or another, but generally Abby Portner plays drums and drums-on-keys, Nina Mehta plays guitar, and Kate Rosko plays keyboard. The songs they make are plain but complex, drony but melodic, fragmented but structured, rhythmic but shambolic: in short, they are impossible. Vocal harmonies grow out of primitive beats (hammered without abandon by Portner) and instrumental pulses. Every sound is placed as if provisionally. They enter and leave the structure of the song as if under some strange magnetic push and pull. Mehta’s guitar (sans any effects, sans even a pick in her hand) and Rosko’s keys flurry notes that never quite resolve into a “line;” sometimes Rosko settles down and repeats clean-sounding arpeggios. This is a music of pure potentiality, and it feels unfettered and free. Never will you walk out of a concert feeling more in the mood to go forth and create your own music, to do it yourself. The final song of the evening, the epic “Scape Aside” was my favorite. It was also the brashest song of Rings’ set. There was a real Western grandeur to it. I heard something like a Morricone vibe early on, and then the dry desert wash morphed into a punk rock chant as Mehta and Rosko created a two guitar, three chord rhythmic attack.

Also on the bill this evening was half of Animal Collective in the form of vocalist Avey Tare (big brother to Portner) and guitarist/other-stuff-ist Deakin. This part of the evening was, of course, magical. Literally, magical: I really believe that they have the ability through the manipulation of loops and delay to transform time. Supposedly their set ended, but I’m not so certain…

Words by John Melillo

[Photos courtesy of Myspace]