Review: The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis at Eulogy
I’ll admit that I’m just the type of music nerd predisposed to take a kindly view toward The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, the recently established collaboration between the D.C.-based instrumental rock trio and the award-winning New York jazz saxophonist. I named Mahavishnu Orchestra, a 1970s jazz fusion combo, as my favorite band in my high school yearbook (which normie teenage editors promptly misspelled as “Mohaveshnu”). And my first original band, Acker, was a jazz-inflected instrumental rock quartet.
I thus expected to have a good time when I caught The Messthetics’ set with Lewis at Eulogy on March 27. I did not expect an encounter with some of the most thrilling and innovative music I’ve ever heard come through Asheville.
The four musicians are interacting in ways that I doubt could have developed in any previous era. It all starts with the rhythm section: Brendan Canty and Joe Lally, respectively handling drums and bass guitar, both former members of the seminal post-hardcore punk band Fugazi.
The two first started working together in 1987. While a nearly 40-year relationship between musicians isn’t new, only now can audiences see the fruits of such longstanding collaboration in a genre that simply didn’t exist before the ‘80s.
Canty and Lally seem to be two halves of a single mind, devoted toward spartan yet creative propulsion. The drummer’s approach is crisp and rapid, with hi-hat and ride cymbal rhythms leading the band onward between whip-tight tom and snare fills. The bassist is profoundly economical — both in terms of playing only what’s necessary and in stage setup, with just a cable directly into his amp — but far from simple in terms of choosing notes and grooves.
And that backing supports two jazz players from a generation that soaked up the musical world Canty and Lally helped create. Messthetics guitarist Anthony Pirog grew up listening to Fugazi, and you can hear the punk freneticism straining from some of his solos. But his energy is married to flawless technique; the result is like flashes of light that sparkle from the facets of a spinning diamond.
Lewis absorbed his punk influences in a more roundabout way, having grown up and trained in the gospel tradition before entering the musical melting pot of the New York City scene. What he seems to have taken most from that exposure is energy, directness of purpose, and unshakable confidence on stage: “a certain road experience that you can’t get in school,” as he put it to Brooklyn Vegan.
None of that comes at the expense of Lewis’ jazz sensibilities or full-throated saxophone tone. And his solos show an irresistible internal logic, as if each were a speech declaimed from a podium, the phrases flowing naturally from one to another while cohering around a central melodic or rhythmic argument.
(Notably, Lewis wasn’t the only saxophone player on the Eulogy stage that evening. Asheville’s Ashley Paul opened with an intense free improv performance backed by local duo MANAS. Rich in texture, her playing ran the gamut from sustained yet angular melody to fully skronking freakout across a compelling 30-minute set.)
Put Lewis and The Messthetics together, and you get a type of jazz fusion unlike anything from its first wave in the 1960s and ’70s. Instead of classic rock, what’s being fused to jazz here is punk, hardcore, and post-rock: a whole range of latter-day genres.
I found it astounding. Enough words — go buy the album, hope that the quartet composes another one soon, and do not miss this crew if it should grace Asheville again.
(Photo by Shervin Lainez)
