Perhaps it would be entered into the modern indy rock canon, when Geordie Greep, the celebrated London guitarist with the strangely pitched accent of a no longer existing european principality split from his band Black Midi, on the feels of a trio of increasingly sophisticated, largely successful releases, the last of which was named “a masterpiece” by no less than the Jon Pareles of the New York Times. Perhaps not. “You do a band for a little bit, do it for three years, have a great vibe, and then finish. Nothing’s meant to go on forever and ever,” Greep was telling NME about this, some months after he announced his involvement in a new band called Geordie Greep And The Swing Boys, which made their live debut in a small club in Brixton, which he described as the beginning of a “new sound,” which a blogger at Stregogum would describe as “an oft-shifting junkyard pile of ideas.”
Some months later, he decided to take these ideas to New York, with an entirely new band composed of “local virtuosos” who were going to deliver “the American variety of his NEW SOUND,” per an Instagram post animated by an illustrated monkey, below which read: FOR THE FIRST TIME ON U.S. SOIL. The shows, including two additional dates that were tacked on, all sold out quickly. That Monday, he would appear at the Williamsburg Pizza outpost in Bushwick to sell give away slices of a kind of “Greep”-themed pizza, alongside branded plates. They all displayed a kind of tortured image of a hand or a foot, I think.
At any rate, Greep appeared at the final of these shows, booked at local Bushwick hipster haunt Sultan Room, wearing a baseball cap, a well-fitted button up shirt and dress pants, looking the part of an incredibly intense college freshman. Nevertheless, his presence was felt. “It’s nice that you’re all here,” said opener Wendy Eisenberg, midway through playing her latest solo album, and normally a touring guitarist for hipster jazz guitarist Bill Orcutt. “And then the rocker will start or whatever.”
The rocker did start, indeed, proceeding through a run of three songs presumably from his upcoming album, all unreleased, including the slight, gothic Mark E. Smith homage “Walk Up,” formerly an unreleased Black Midi song called “Lumps.” By now, the song sounded thinner and slinkier, percussions now animated by a dueling pair of drummers, Charlie Schefft, on hire from his day job in the indie jazz group On a Limb, and Santiago Moyano, a Colombian salsa drummer in a floral shirt, who followed Greep along through elaborately-written musical notation on an iPad. Toward the end of every set, Greep graciously gave him a break from doing this and, instead, allowed Moyano to lead the group through a run of an old Willie Colón song.
What was moving, perhaps most, was Greep’s project of commanding attention to music that diligently strains away from view, following along the avant garde sensibilities of similarly overeducated precisionists. Take Greep’s debut single, the aggressively uneasy “Holy, Holy,” whose kitsch sensibilities were compared by a Pitchfork blogger somehow both to Steely Dan and forgotten Cleveland neverbeens Pere Ubu, and whose supporters that Friday in Bushwick were clinging on to every word, jumping up and down as Greep chanted “I want you to make me look taller, could you kneel down the whole time?” Eventually, he got his band to jam through song’s outro some three or four times, the effect of which felt less “Dirty Work” than “Roundabout.”
It was the aggressive kitchiness, the repeated refusals to dispel with the theater kid accusations that made it moving. Here he was, breaking away from his immediate peers in order to make a more exact and precise form of what he was doing before. The precision was as revealing as the t-shirts and the inky special edition metrocards his label was selling at the merch table; there was a detailed, intricate architecture that the Greep was assembling and disassembling, as deliberate as it was digressive. Greep’s future would not be with the Thom Yorkes or the Julian Casablancas of the world, but instead, perhaps, be with the likes of Mr. Collins and Mr. Gabriel, jamming intently, precisely, for someone.
“How much time we got,” he asked near the end of his set, sweat finally dripping down the brim of his hat, which remained unmoved and his smile unbothered. “Ten minutes? That’s just enough.”
All photos taken by Andrew Karpan.
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