Sometimes music as seemingly simple as Page France’s feels like it’s hardly worth writing about. At the Black Cat on Thursday, the Cumberland, MD six-piece (reigning as the undisputed best indie pop band in western Maryland) played a thirty minute set. Maybe 8 or 10 songs, each one barely more than a hastily-strummed acoustic guitar, a tinkling xylophone, and a simple snare beat. Some songs hardly even had a single chord change for the first minute.
And so it feels a little awkward to say I loved it, but, man, all life’s pleasures should be so simple. Using the well-worn indie pop template – take some folk chords, speed them up, add a quirky, nasally lead singer, dress it up with a cute female backup vocalist and some toy pianos or something – they managed to really make it their own for that half hour. For example, the lilting “Junkyard” never reaches the rousing climax you want it to, but that just sticks the focus on Michael Nau’s spiritual, fever-dream lyrics.
If you were one of the fifteen or so people in attendance, you probably heard a lot of Neutral Milk Hotel in Page France: (inredibly well-miced) trumpets exalt mid-song, fiery rings burn around angels, and the whole band sort of shambles, careens without ever fully coming derailed. But Page France seem (and are) younger and more innocent than NMH, closer to the wide-eyed, hopeful characters that fill Nau’s songs. There was a childlike goofiness in “Elephant”, and even “Chariot”, despite being a plea for some kind of sign of affirmation from above, had a wonderful air of innocence, Nau trailing off, “So we will become a happy ending”. And with that, a happy ending it was to one very pleasant half-hour, just enough to show that these guys have a little more depth than your average indie pop band.
There were three other perfectly good bands on the woefully underattended bill last night, too. Champaign, Illinois’s punchy pop quartet Headlights kicked things off just before Page France. David Vandervelde and his Moonstation House Band kicked ass with their power-trio Crazy Horse-styled glam workouts and cover of Rolling Stones oddity “Cocksucker Blues”, and Richard Swift’s more formal but still a little screwy piano pop songs reminded of the Pernice Brothers. All perfectly worthy of a post in their own right, but Page France’s performance — in all its unassuming glory — stood out.
