Thao’s songs are refreshingly not all about angsty break-ups. Instead, she writes about family and presents the everyday with new significance as she says, “You can’t build cathedrals out of finger steeples,” and “We don’t dive, we cannonball.” A year and a half ago, Thao was in the Satellite Ballroom, opening for Laura Veirs. The crowd was all ears and she was audible. She could be quiet and comfortable onstage. She wore jeans and a T-shirt. Instead of the brass featured on the new recording of “Feet Asleep,” it was a guitar-and-handclap affair. And she was one name. Maybe now her simpler, more-folk-than-rock sound seems old in the face of the newly-named band.
 Thao brought her new band, The Get Down Stay Down, and a more raucous sound to Miller’s on Saturday night. |
Saturday night at Miller’s, The OK Bird (Adam Thompson, the most recent addition to Thao’s band) took the stage solo for a bit as the opener. Thompson’s vocals range from shouting to singing to something like yodeling, all with intermittent squeaks that sound like a clarinet in the hands of a fifth-grader. It’s undeniably experimental and would be perfect for those who prize music that an exclusive few have heard. Not many people were listening; Thompson threw comments into the audience with little response. But the bar crowd is a hard crowd.
Thao opened with “What About,” the closest thing to a title track from Like the Linen, her first album. A bouncy song from the start, it fits well into the new sound, the more-rock-than-folk that seems to have come along with The Get Down Stay Down. But the band name is too many syllables long, and in some cases the music distracts from and overpowers the lyrics. The band itself struggled to be heard Saturday in the jumble of loud bar conversations. Where at Satellite, Thao just stood, strummed and sang, at Miller’s she jumped around with her shiny black guitar and yelled to be heard. Towards the end of the set, Thao played “Moped,” one of the beautifully sparse songs from Like the Linen. On the album, it was just guitar and vocals, but live, with an entire band backing it, all I could hear was percussion and shouting. Other songs, like “Bag of Hammers” (from the new album, We Brave Bee Stings & All), are built more loudly—“Shake the frame of this house / Distress the wood, make it shout”—and can hold the band’s sound without being washed out by it.