MUTEMATH
Emo’s Austin
February 25, 2016
MUTEMATH are proving to be fighters and, if they keep it up, they’ll find themselves as (gasp!) career artists – able to transition time, the demand for new material and a live touring circuit that doesn’t ever seem to get easier for artists. They just launched their Vitals World Tour and Austin was one of the fortunate stops in late February.
With a sold-out show, Emo’s Austin was packed with fans of all ages, shapes and sizes – though the majority were twenty-somethings. The room had an energy to it that was ready to explode when the band hit the hazardously laid-out stage at 10:20 p.m. As the band has made it habit, Darren King’s drumset sits pretty much flush against the stage at stage left (if you’re rusty on your stage orientation, the directions are always from the perspective of the performer on stage, making “stage left” be on the far right to the audience member’s perspective). This was expected, but the other 25 feet of stage depth was not set up with the usual open-for-roaming space for the performers. Instead, it was like a maze of vertical light poles from front to back and left to right. Bassist Roy Mitchell-Cardenas and latest addition guitarist Todd Gummerman (added in 2011) hardly had any room for posturing or moving about – but MUTEMATH has never had to resort to the typical rock antics to entertain its audience. The piano was front and center, the guitar pedal board was to his right and Mitchel-Cardenas mostly interacted with King over by the drumset. Once the show began, the stage was dark and lit up by upwards of a 100 of these lightsticks. They lit up in a myriad of ways, like LCD screens that gave them motion and multiple color variations.
The opening three songs told the story of the night. They launched into one of their brand new songs, “Stratosphere,” then fired into “Chaos” and then “Prytania,” taking nary a break in between. The band was as tight as ever and totally “on” in every sense of the word. Frontman Paul Meany took to the microphone on a raised platform behind the piano and a wall of lights, but he and each of his bandmates were clearly putting out. It was just what the fans wanted.
The band continued to pepper its set with new material, almost alternating every other song or so with a new one. This created a dynamic set that worked. The sounds of “Joy Rides” filled up the room nicely. The lead-off track to Vitals starts the album off with a decidedly dance-able sound, but it comes alive on stage a little bit more – these electronic riffs obviously created with a live setting in mind. It was still totally danceable, but it rocked loud and hard.
“Blood Pressure” tweaked the tempo ever so slightly, it seemed, with a big hollow body guitar sound reminiscent of mid ‘80s bands like Big Country.
After about an hour of pretty much non-stop uptempo tunes, Meany took a moment to thank the crowd for being there for the band, pointing to “Control” as being where it started 10 years ago. (I guess he meant its release on their self-titled full-length debut as the official introduction of the song, as opposed to its inclusion on the Reset debut EP in 2004, which seemed odd … but the song sounded as great as ever.) Like the lyrics state, “such a beau-ti-ful surrender,” it self-describes the beauty of the song.
It’s great to hear a band at the top of its game, but still performing as if they had something to prove. MUTEMATH simply killed it, and that’s all there was to it. With a catalog full of great songs, they could have easily played three hours, but they reigned things in for a 22-song set that included four encores. “Monument” and “Remain” greeted the audience and anyone familiar with the band knew what was likely next (two of their most popular tunes that had yet to be performed this night) – “Reset” and “Typical.” Triumphant.
–Photos and review by Doug Van Pelt
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