It took weeks of listening to a burned copy of Living Better Electrically before they finally graced me and the rest of Austin with their first live appearance.  It had been months since they’d played in public, period.

They chose Austin local dive, Trophy’s down on South Congress.  The last time I slid into that place was months and months ago.  If you’ve ever been there, you can imagine my shock when I heard LBE was booked for the show.  If you haven’t, then I’ll share with you the text I got from a friend meeting me there, “WR R U?  This place is SCARY.”

When asked, “Why there?” Jakob gave a list of obvious reasons.  It had been a while.  It was close to home.  Oh, and they said yes when LBE asked if they could play.  But less expected was the warm description of a bar back in Mississippi where he and his brother used to play before they were even old enough to drive: a small, run-down, dive-y shack in Jackson, down the street from the house, too.  It was a “warm-up.” 

Well.  That’s one way to put it.  But it’s a little like saying August in Austin is warm.   These guys are hot- like sitting-on-the-upper-deck-during-3-o’clock-traffic-with-no-A/C hot; ACL-festival-in-dirty-cut-offs-and-a-bikini-top hot. 

It’s hard to believe that such a rich sound can come out of only four band members.  Layer upon layer of sound creates something of a symphony. 

Three of the four harmonize, and Josh and Jakob Clark take turns as lead singer.  During certain songs, together, they produced haunting and slightly irreverent fantasy-like background vocals.

Keyboardist Chris Michaels is nothing short of genius, at times delivering strong and deliberate measures, and at others injecting purposely off-kilter melodies.  

Jody Suarez on percussion sets the tone and pace for each piece.  A Beatles-like snare drum-roll is a far different rhythm from some of the sleepy crash symbol tapping heard in the more bluesy numbers.    

I couldn’t tell where some sounds were coming from: flute, orchestra strings, xylapohone, and the random hard-edged feedback.  Every time the thickness in sound was going to be too much for too long, the band retreated back into a dreamy one- or two-tone break.

With ultra hip lines like, “Jezabelle was a chick I knew one time” and “Are you crying, love? Well don’t forget to breathe babe,” these Mississippi boys have got the goods.   

The combination is almost Tim Burton-esque.    No real genre to pigeon-hole them, no real classification for the masses to identify specifically.  Perfectly Indie.     

Admittedly, having that CD made me biased.  I was one step ahead of the crowd, singing half the lyrics and faking the rest- All at the top of my lungs, mind you.   But I am no be-all, end-all music talent scout. 

The crowd was thick, and mixed, so I asked around. 

There was what I call, the shiny-shirt guy, “Eh.  It’s alright.  I mean, I kept waiting for that (fist tight, punch in the air) umf.  But it didn’t happen.” 

I talked to the tall and lanky post-raver type and he shared, “Yeah…I’m having a good time.  It’s just not really my thing.” 

The cougar stalking her pray (poor clean-cut ex-football and frat boy next to her), giggled coyly, “Yeah!  I love it; That guy on the right [Jakob] looks just like Jack Black!”  Now there’s a musical opinion to trust, I know.    

There was the self-proclaimed music enthusiast, “This is a band’s band.  I dig it.”

The journalist, mining for that nugget of gold in this music-saturated river-bank of a town, “Amazing.  I’m having a religious experience.”  

And a couple of dreamers here and there murmuring references to The Beatles, David Bowie, and random Austin bands they’ve happened upon in their Austin experience. 

All in all, not a bad start: Of a crowd between 50 and 75, they got: amazing, religious, hot, diggable, alright, and good, but not my thing.

In one of my post-show conversations with Jakob Clark, I asked what he made of such a wide range of opinions, and then he told me something that solidified my notion of why these guys are so great. 

“Listen, we’ve been around, and we’ve done the label thing.* Ultimately, I would rather have a fan-base of 10,000 people who buy my music every time it comes out, who love my music, who follow my career, who appreciate, what I’m doing, than to have a million people buy my album one time for that one song that makes it big, and they never listen to me again…We are never going to be that band.”

They ended the night with a dreamy, Sun Goes Down. Appropriate and lovely. 

*Living Better Electrically has the same tragic history of so many great groups: get signed, record, part ways with the label when they refuse to allow their music to be so manipulated and over-produced that it doesn’t sound like their creative work anymore.