by Emma Ingrisani
With a gallery space minimally adapted to live music—white walls, wires snarled on the floor, a fully kicked-out bass drum on the stage—The Bowery Union hosted a relaxed and eclectic show on Friday night, culminating in a memorable performance by Marissa Paternoster (also of the Screaming Females) and her band.
The concert opened with Amelia Jackie (accompanied by Taryn Blake Miller), whose songwriting delicately twisted strands of folk and country with pop and a Queer Americana sensibility. Next up was the bracing Latinx hardcore/screamo group Compa; vocalist Sayuri paced deliberately below the stage as the band barreled through songs excoriating systemic racism and mourning its lingering effects. The band Shop Talk followed, delivering an energetic and poised set of three-chord punk rock.
When Paternoster and her bandmates took the stage, the room stayed dark as she adjusted effects pedals and the sound system was tweaked; the room, with its high corrugated ceiling, filled with the reverberating droning. What followed when the lights came up was mostly drawn from Paternoster’s new album Peace Meter and previous solo project Noun, featuring closely harmonizing vocals and layered guitar, synthesizer (Shanna Polley, also on backing vocals), and drums (Angie Boylan).
Paternoster’s reputation as a virtuoso guitarist and powerhouse frontperson, forged through innumerable scorching sets with the Screaming Females, was surely sustained on Friday with beautifully intricate, bold solos: at times octave-leaping and monumental; at others, atmospherically grungy and framed with fuzz. It was also a decisive departure from the particular intensity of her work with the Females—venturing into new compositional terrain with a dreamier sound matched to contemplative, vulnerable lyrics.
This new material was nicely adapted to the ensemble's scale, sometimes building out stylistically spare tracks into fully fledged live arrangements (“Speak to Me” from the Noun release In the Shade being an intriguing example). The synth and drums often seemed to wrap around or double the guitar's effects while further filling out the sonic space, and Paternoster’s strong, rawly emotive voice felt similarly enhanced and buoyed through harmony with Polley on several songs.
Like Peace Meter, characterized by Pitchfork as a “reintroduction” to listeners familiar with her earlier music, the show affirmed Paternoster’s serious talent as a songwriter and performer, with a creative restlessness that continues to push toward further evolution.
