This Is Not This Heat and Bradford Cox at The Earl, Atlanta, July 29, 2019

This is not This Is Not This Heat eating dinner.  This is This Is Not This Heat not eating dinner.

The Music Desk has been fortunate to have caught several outstanding shows already this year.  If, simply for the matter of expediency, we set aside the performances at Big Ears, those outstanding shows include DBUK at The Earl, Nels Cline at The Bakery, Kishi Bashi at The Georgia Theater, and Julia Holter at Aisle 5, among others.  

We can add to that list, maybe even top that list, with last night's show featuring Bradford Cox and This Is Not This Heat at the venerable Earl.  Cox opened.

For the uninitiated, Marietta, Georgia's Bradford Cox is the frontperson for the bands Deerhunter and Atlas Sound, as well as a solo performer.  We had no idea of what to expect from him last night, but never would have guessed that he would open the show with two other musicians playing a largely improvised set of experimental music while mostly squatting over various small percussion instruments, a vintage synth, and a bass guitar. What sounded at first like Steve Reich minimalism quickly grew into what only could be called maximalism, as in everything that could possibly be thrown into the mix.  

Again for the benefit of the uninitiated, that sounds nothing like either Deerhunter or Atlas Sound, but we loved it and it was well received by the packed house at The Earl.  At times, it was reminiscent of some of Thor Harris' recent work, but the overall sound was denser and more improvisational than Thor & Friends' compositions.  There's no telling if this is a new direction for Cox or just a one-off experiment, something that he simply wanted to try his hand at and having now done it will next move on to other things.  That's part of the fun of being a Bradford Cox fan - you never know what you'll get but you're always sure it will be interesting.

Last night marks the second time this year we've seen This Is Not This Heat (we said it's been a good year).  We caught them last March in Knoxville at the Big Ears Festival and although that was a great show, sandwiched as it was between jazz masters Carla Bley and Makaya McCracken, it didn't get the full recognition it deserved. We don't think we've even gotten around to "unpacking" the experience yet.

This Is Not This Heat is the name taken by the reunion of the '70s band This Heat.  Originally a trio, the two surviving members have recruited several younger musicians to perform their songs live and are now touring as a sextet consisting of two drummers, two guitarists, and two multi-instrumentalists on bass, oboe, keys, and guitar.

This Heat were always ahead of their time.  In the 1970s, they were playing music that we would call "post-punk" today but before the punk sound had even peaked.  Their experimental, confrontational, and politically charged songs set This Heat apart from the rest of the punk scene, and they are today widely considered a link between early 1970s music styles such as prog and krautrock and later experimental genres such as industrial music and post-rock.  Their music has been described as "an impressive procession of tangential shards that encompass tape collages, Middle Eastern motifs, barbaric vocal clamoring, and occasional pointy-jagged-atonal guitar passages" (AllMusic.com).  Here's 24-Track Loop, which they played near the end of their set last night, from their 1978 eponymous LP.

No two songs during last night's set sounded alike.  At times their sound was reminiscent of the pioneering German prog band Can, at times they sounded like free jazz or even the kind of groove-based jazz of Medeski Martin & Wood, and at times their sound was clearly the blueprint for later post-punk bands like Gang of Four.  In short, they sounded like nothing that came before or after them yet at the same time they were clearly pioneers for much of the cutting edge in experimental rock music for the next 20 to 30 years.  We're not sure if we or the rest of the world has fully caught up to them, even now.

Here are some excerpts from last night's show, featuring brief, random excerpts from Twilight Furniture, Independence, and the set's closer, Health and Efficiency.

The Earl was at full capacity - although we never saw a "Sold Out" announcement, we think they reached the limit at the door before or shortly after the show started.  We were front and center of the stage for the set - best spot in the house, other than having to contend with two videographers who kept crawling in front of and over us and even onto the stage (it's amazing the sense of privilege  holding a camera gives to some men).

Having seen This Heat earlier at Big Ears, we had a better idea of what to expect and as a result we enjoyed the show even more the second time around.  Given that and the opening Bradford Cox performance, this had to be one of the Shows of the Year for 2019.