Nada Surf rides
a wave of driving indie pop
Nada Surf/Rogue Wave/Inara George
March 9, 2006
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in
The Boston Globe, March 14, 2006
Ten years ago, Nada Surf was simply another one-hit wonder that breezed onto the airwaves just before the door slammed shut on the alt-rock boom of the early 1990s. But the song for which it’s best known, the gonzo teen survival guide “Popular,” was of only marginal interest to the sold-out crowd that showed up Thursday at the Paradise.
That’s not to say that it wasn’t cheered when it popped up towards the end, but by that point it was abundantly clear that the audience wasn’t simply sticking around just to hear one song. Over the course of a set that lasted more than two hours, Nada Surf drew heavily on 2002’s Let Go and last year’s The Weight Is A Gift, from the quasi-“Search And Destroy” chords of the opening “Hi-Speed Soul” to “Your Legs Grow,” which saw singer Matthew Caws alone on stage with an electric guitar.
Caws was a fine frontman for this post-O.C., post-Garden State moment. Wearing a decidedly unglamorous striped polo shirt, he moved around the stage in endearingly stiff and awkward movements and sang in an angelic voice with a slight lisp. But what could have tipped over into insufferable wimpiness if left unchecked was transformed into driving indie pop by bassist Daniel Lorca and drummer Ira Elliot.
They added muscle to the songs, which never
crunched too
hard or rang out with too much jangle. Both “The Way You Wear Your
Head” and
“Imaginary Friends” were pure power pop, while songs like “Paper Boats”
reached
effectively dramatic climaxes as Caws, Lorca and Elliot simply rode out
the
chords. Members of the opening acts filled in on a few songs, but the
greatest
show of camaraderie came during the twistworthy “Blankest Year,” when
everyone
on the bill flooded the stage and danced the next few minutes away.
Second-billed Rogue Wave occasionally fell into the trap of relying more on its sound – a heavily reverbed swell that placed pinging lead guitar lines atop jangly arpeggios – than on its material. As a result, “Medicine Ball” and “Sewn Up” didn’t seem to go anywhere, but the band hit its mark more than enough times to make up for it. “Publish My Love” gained energy every time it returned to the main riff, while “Love’s Lost Guarantee” built organically to create the drama that Rogue Wave’s echoey sound promised.
Of the three acts on the bill, only opener Inara George has yet to appear on an O.C. compilation. Sadly, she never seemed to grab more than half of the chatty crowd, which was a shame, because her intimate and idiosyncratic material would have worked better with her audience’s undivided attention. George applied her girlishly jazzy voice to songs that were filled with so many delirious shifts and rotations that they seemed like they could go in any melodic direction at any time.