Dressed to thrill

Music Row
By Brian Rademaekers

In its own way, all of modern popular music is theater. Musicians, with their dress, style, and even sound, create characters that evoke certain ideas and emotions — all of which can enhance their performances.
And while music always ought to be about the music, some of the best musicians have found ways to up the ante by adding a visual dimension to already stellar compositions. Think David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. That album not only sent ripples through the world of rock, but, with its robe-clad and makeup-smeared front man, also had young men dressing in some very odd fashions in the mid-’70s.
One of the latest troupes to pursue that vein of theatrical musicianship is Sophe Lux, a five-piece band from Portland, Ore., that draws on everything from indie pop to vaudevillian performances from the days of yore.
At first listen, their second full-length album, Waking the Mystics, can be a bit jarring. Released last month, it’s as if the composers scooped up bits and chunks of every piece of music made between the invention of the phonograph and the release of the latest model of the Moog. Glockenspiels joust with synthesizers while Marie Antoinette robots ride bumper cars in this wild, yet beautiful, collection of songs.
As you wind through the 13 tracks of Waking, the smorgasbord of influences seeps through and slowly blends to form a touchingly unique sound layered with masterful musicianship from the band’s players.
The album’s first track, Target Market, starts out like a bass-heavy mash-up of Portishead and the Decemberists, combining thudding rhythms with eerie synthesizers and, later, guitar and accordion. But what stands out here, and in most other songs, is the voice of Wendy Haynes. At times operatic, and at times like a soulful Tori Amos, Haynes’ voice jumps from throaty yelps to soft harmonies with amazing fluidity.
Immediately within this first song, we hear the diverse stock of characters and styles that Haynes employs throughout the album. It is this informed schizophrenia that allows Sophe Lux to weave through the lush ballads, delicate jazz and pure indie rock contained on its second release.
On the third track, Marie Antoinette Robot 2073, we get the group’s most blatant nod to its rock-opera predecessors. Broken into three parts, the song takes the listener through an existential meltdown where the main character confronts the reality of her own memories and dreams amid weariness with "being." This thought-heavy musical play evokes Queen’s Freddie Mercury on Bohemian Rhapsody, but Haynes is sure to put her own distinctively modern touch on the delivery.
Again, moving in and out of rippling declarations and silky emotional diatribes, Haynes conveys a rich palate of perspectives and feeling as she expounds on the robot’s philosophical crisis.
And while songs like that stick out in their rock-cabaret format, others, like President, are political statements with their own unique sound that could have landed them on a whole other album. On President, Haynes spins a fantasy about the ideal president while lamenting the current state of affairs quite plainly, such as with these lines:

Countless bodies burning bridges losing liberties
For a war based on the export of democracy
Have no answers no solutions no possibilities
I cast my ballot for a new day an eternal spring

Complementing the poetic political subversion is the highly skilled guitar-playing of Twayan Williams, who enshrines the song in Yo La Tengo-style reverb. Haynes’ songwriting continues the critique of modern American life on God Doesn’t Take American Express, putting the hollowness of materialism and our tendency to sterilize life’s dangers on the tip of a spear for all to enjoy. Chasing that song is a tribute to Lou Andreas-Salome, a Russian intellectual and friend of Friedrich Nietzsche — a clear signal that there is more at play in the music of Sophe Lux than imitations of other rock bands.
Sonically speaking, there is enough pomp in the performances of this emerging Portland band to carry them to their own level of distinction. Possibly only outdone by their compatriots the Decemberists (who share a common producer and hometown with Lux) in the quest to create sophisticated and literate rock, this ensemble is helping to carve out a new genre in American music that has no limits to the influences that can be drawn from.
The fact that they come to their performances in costumes of the various characters that populate their songs only adds another beautiful but bizarre layer to the band.
Call it operatic pop, rock cabaret, existential glam — whatever you want. The fact is that these newcomers have found a way to express themselves that is both instantly familiar and eternally personal. ••
Brian Rademaekers can be reached at 215-354-3039 or brademaekers@phillynews.com

See them play ...
Who: Sophe Lux
What: A quintet off the Northwest coast delivering their own take on indie rock, a la theatrics and epic songwriting
Where: The Fire, at Fourth Street and Girard Avenue in Northern Liberties
When: Friday, April 6, at 9 p.m. Tickets are $7.