El Vy Show Side-Projects Can Lead the Way
Published
Fusing Brent Knopf’s outrageous musicianship with Matt Berninger’s baritone-inspired magnetism, El Vy are a collaborative force worth getting excited about. Or if you already are, then ensure it’s maintained.
The second side-project to come out of morphings from the National and Menoma (Pfarmers contains Danny Seim from Menomena and Brian Devendorf from the National), but it’s by far the most well known of the two. El Vy’s debut European tour was a sell-out across the board, comprised of numbers from 2015’s Return to the Moon – an album that’s apparently been twelve years in the making.
The music produced by Berninger and Knopf is fantastically obscure, sounding little like their day-to-day groups and instead conjuring considerations of the Specials (‘Silent Ivy Hotel’), Beck (‘Sad Case’) or a beautifully stripped-back the Strokes (‘Sleeping Light’).
Their shallow back-catalogue is as varied as the 4AD roster on which they’re represented, a reassuring place for any musicians to find themselves listed.
El Vy’s show at the Electric Ballroom was much more modest to what Berninger would now be used to, but the smaller venue was a befitting environment for the new duo. ‘Happiness, Missouri’, with its distorted riffs and screamed chorus, feels like it was written for sweaty, low-ceilinged rooms, as does the evening’s standout track – ‘I’m the Man to Be’ – with it’s thudding bass intro and frequent references to Berninger’s manhood. Not that the latter was a rarity during the show, if anything discussion around such filled the gaps between songs. Which, as the duo became more drunk onstage, lasted for longer and became increasingly incoherent as time passed. It definitely helped to keep things interesting.
Bringing the set to a close with ‘Need a Friend’ (“not because we want to, but because we have no further material”), the audience was left cheering long after the band had left the stage. El Vy’s experimental approach was well received, an embodiment of everything a side-project should be.
http://www.elvy.co/
Images courtesy of Shannon Covelesk and @lucasbish.
