by LE Francis
I’m always game for a Hail the Sun show & The Crocodile is probably my favorite venue in downtown Seattle. So when I saw the tickets for the March 17th show on sale, it was an easy purchase.
The Croc is located in Belltown. Belltown is a fairly walkable neighborhood with a lot of bars & restaurants, & a good amount parking lot options (I do not recommend the one off the alley across from the venue though). I even found a fun barcade a few blocks away called Jupiter that is the perfect place to grab a drink & play pinball before the show.
Hail the Sun has rolled through a couple times in the last year & both times has brought along some really fun acts for openers. This time they were co-headlining with Intervals, a virtuosic instrumental band out of Toronto & they had two opening bands: Body Thief & Makari. The four bands definitely had common elements & meshed well together, but each leaned into a slightly different variation of the post-hardcore & prog-rock subgenres. It made for a really interesting & engaging live experience.
The room was pretty crowded, but the bar rail configuration was slightly different than the last time I was there, cutting a bigger area for the bar. I got a spot at the rail about halfway through the room & could see & hear pretty well. There’s really not a bad spot in the venue that I’ve found. Overall, it was a really solid showing for all four bands but here are a few things that caught my attention about each.
Body Thief
Body Thief has a very familiar sound. I listened to their 2022 album “Every Ending” to prep for the show & the word that immediately popped into my head was “Swancore,” & a quick glance through the album info shows they are indeed signed to Blue Swan.
As a former DGD fan, I went into the show pretty sure I was going to love their set. & it wasn’t bad at all but the levels seemed a bit off. The backing vocals were incredibly quiet & I found myself popping my earplug out several times just to hear parts of the song. There’s a lot of melodic layering to their songs so the backing vocals are pretty pivotal – you need to hear both voices for the line to really develop. I don’t know if this was a snafu on the soundboard or if it was fatigue on the part of the backing vocalist. Either way, it led to a very muddled rendition that while it wasn’t bad at all, I definitely feel that they probably had better shows on this tour.
After a few songs, the lead singer was noticeably struggling & they ended up cutting the set early, revealing that the singer had been struggling with throat issues. Listen, on the absolute face of it – this was a long tour & his style requires him to be constantly running laps through his falsetto range. That is a monumental task on the face of it. People often don’t consider the conditions of living on the road for weeks or even months at the time or the physical toll of singing in a taxing style night after night, even with vocal saving mode engaged, it can be easy to blow your voice out & hard to recover it without good sleep, access to soothing foods/drinks, & being able to rest the voice completely. Then we factor in viruses – precovid was dicey, but now? I saw so many announcements that bands had to call off dates & even whole tours this winter & early spring.
Was it the best set I’ve seen this year? Far from it. But the band had a good reason for it & I hope the rest of the tour went better for them.
Makari
I just want to know how these guys aren’t huge already?
I’ve known about Makari for a while. I started following Andy Cizek without ever listening to any of his music because he was fucking with people on Twitter & it was amusing. & while I saw some of his covers that went viral online & thought the dude had a nice voice, I wasn’t super into it. He’s very adept technically but has a clean, fairly generic tone that I felt like I’d heard before. In retrospect I realize that a good portion of that is probably production. But at the time Makari didn’t actually have a lot available to listen to — an album & a couple of EP’s. So I just kinda held off on dipping into their discography.
But when I was prepping for the show, their album “Wave Machine” had just dropped & I gave it a listen & really liked it. But again, it had a squeaky clean feel to it that while not bad, just wasn’t super catchy to my ear on the first couple of listens.
Live was another story though, a whole experience. Aside from being a very technically good vocalist, Cizek is an amazing frontman. He’s a pro with crowd engagement & even had me jumping along even though I’m very old & tired & hadn’t really connected with the songs prior to the show. The songs have a different feel live.
Instrumentally, the band is solid & puts on a great show live. They too have a bit of a Swancore feel to their music but it’s a little more polished. They scratch the same itch though & as someone who is not interested in listening to DGD anymore, it’s nice to have an alternative.
Intervals
I’ve seen Intervals a couple of times now & while they’re a fun act to watch, I feel like this set ran a little long for me. & admittedly, I came into it with a less than amazing attitude because there’s no seating at The Croc & two opening sets plus two headlining sets is a lot for me. There’s the anxiety of knowing that I have a 3 hour drive over two remote mountain passes as soon as the show’s done, but honestly I just shapeshift into Tom Riley once my bodily discomfort gets to a certain point.
However, I didn’t hate the set, and never regret taking up a chance to see these guys play. I love the groove of their music & there’s something about the absolute joy that is beaming from every musician on stage during their set.
But there’s something about their music that just doesn’t stick with me. & I had to take a minute to really think about why that was. First, I want to say that it’s not that it’s instrumental. I remember the last time I saw them (with Spritibox), lead guitarist/composer/sole full-time member of the band Aaron Marshall said something about “thank you for giving instrumental music a chance” as if he wasn’t talking to a crowd from a scene that includes bands like Polyphia, Chon, & Strawberry Girls. & I love instrumental music. Hell, my favorite song off of Thank You Scientist’s flawless “Terraformer” album is probably “Chromology,” despite being a huge fan of Sal Marrano’s vocal style, there are so many catchy runs across multiple instruments in that piece of music.
One thing that stood out to me with Intervals vs. some of these other bands is despite how technically talented as every musician on that stage is & as densely written as each composition is, I’m inevitably humming orphan vocal lines to myself while I listen. & maybe part of that is an imbalance in the mix live because obviously Marshall’s guitar is the lead instrument. But while some of these songs are inarguable bangers, the lead lines just aren’t hooking into my head like vocal lines. Take “Blue Powder” by Steve Vai or “Playing God” by Polyphia or “Peaches in Regalia” by Frank Zappa — I could easily isolate & try to hum the lead for any of those songs. But it’s lost in the sauce in a lot of Intervals songs, especially live, & I inevitably find my goofy ass humming my own lines through the densely packed songs.
It’s not that it’s instrumental for me, it’s actually that the songs seem to be crammed full of several equally showy parts that don’t so much dovetail into each other, but seem to float parallel in musical spacetime. While it’s fun & I love catching them live, it gives me a bit of mental indigestion.
My favorite way of seeing Intervals will always be as an opener, but that’s me. There were several people around me going apeshit through the whole set. I’m super happy for the folks it resonates with because Marshall & his touring crew are all super talented musicians who seem to genuinely love their material & put on a great show. Definitely would not be opposed to catching them again in the future, especially in an opening slot.
Hail the Sun
I’ve seen Hail the Sun a handful of times — I saw them last year in Seattle at the Croc on their Divine Inner Tension tour, the year prior opening for The Fall of Troy at the Hawthorne in Portland, & years ago at the Funhouse (El Corazon’s bar) in Seattle. They have been consistently good since that OG show at The Funhouse & I will always head out to a Hail the Sun show if I can make it work with my schedule.
Because I’m very familiar with their music & have written about them before, I’m not going to go into the details of the music the same way as I did with the other bands. I will say that the first time I saw them they were touring on Wake & it was insane to me that the lead singer, Donovan Melero, was playing drums & nailing every vocal part at the same time. & Melero still does that with the classic songs but I also noticed he’s up there chewing gum while he’s singing the new stuff & I almost wonder if he simply needs some sort of challenge to sing as he does? His technique is interesting because he’s doing a lot internally but you can’t read it on his face — he spends a lot of time in a ringing falsetto range but sometimes he looks like he’s just having a conversation with the crowd, other times he appears to be yawning, or visibly working the gum around his mouth. It’s an interesting vibe & ultimately comes across really relaxed despite the sometimes crushingly emotional content of the lyrics.
But they couldn’t offer you the chillest show in the world when a good chunk of their songs are about struggling with addiction, anxiety & depression. Nah, leave it to their guitarist Shane Gann who ventured out onto a barely there bar rail that didn’t appear to actually be anchored to anything. & if that wasn’t enough to fear for his life, he decided to crowd surf into the GA area. Sure, it’s probably not the ideal thing to jump over the people potentially holding drinks in the bar but at least the bar was all the adults. The crowd on the GA side of the rail was mostly kids who looked like they’d not graduated high school yet. It seemed dicey for a few minutes as he seemed to sink down below view, but the crowd pulled it together & eventually he was upright & back on stage.
I also want to put a little note in here that Melero spoke openly about the genocide in Palestine & dedicated their performance of “Secret Wars” to the victims. This is always a pro for me, knowing that they aren’t fake & act with conviction on the empathy they write about in their music, even if it’s a contentious topic that opens them up to criticism from bad faith actors.
I can’t really say this was the best Hail the Sun show I’ve gone to. & I don’t think I could rank them if I was honest. Each has a unique feel in my memory — last summer’s show, returning to the Croc a month after meeting up with my crush there, every note dragging under the weight of time & distance & longing; the Portland show where I was blissfully buzzed & somehow ended up pushing around a really big dude for kicking my friend in the head; or my first experience of seeing them live at the Funhouse. I hope it’s enough to say they’ve all been good, they’ve always been a great live band, & I’ve never had a bad time at one of their shows.
Maybe, I’ll see you out there next time.
Verses on Verses is a biweekly music column from the perspective of a poet. Inquiries can be directed to LE Francis, lefrancis@sagecigarettes.com.
LE Francis (she/her) is the managing editor of Sage Cigarettes Magazine; a columnist & staff artist for Cream Scene Carnival Magazine; co-host & staff editor of A Ghost in the Magazine & The Annegirls Podcast; & the author of THIS SPELL OF SONG & STAR available through Bottlecap Press. She is a writer, musician, & visual artist living in the rainshadow of the Washington Cascades. Find her online at nocturnical.com.
