Live Review: Soft and Dumb at Golden Dagger, Chicago

                                                        


Comprising of guitarist/vocalist Elena Buenrostro and drummer Travis Newgren, Chicago duo Soft and Dumb combine a gentle and careful lyrical outlook with a sometimes harsher drive, that evokes imagery of Mitski experimenting with Protomartyr. 'never wanna'  is their new single, the lead from their forthcoming self-titled album. 

After meeting at college in Urbana, Illinois, they gained a following by playing as many DIY shows as they could, often in houses. Ryan Doyle Elward went to see the band live in their natural habitat and found a band starting to come into their own.


Duo Soft and Dumb goes into a set at Chicago’s Golden Dagger that alternates between newer material and tracks off 2020 album Out of Bed. Because of this combination, it’s a bespoke experience. They create a push/pull type of dynamic by bringing the moody, slow blinking, intimate songs together with the raucous songs of double energy and it’s perfect for this venue. The space is long and narrow, so the crowd gathers tight against the stage just like a basement show, an atmosphere that is this band’s bread and butter.


Mostly in fact composed in a basement – passing music to one another during the early period of the pandemic – Out of Bed was a single piece of cinema, with songs smoothly patched into the next and where the nucleus of each is elusive. Beginnings and ends mean nothing. Under the noise there’s a melody waiting to materialise, and when it does it’s a trance sublime.

Thumper’ becomes ‘Thillens’ and it’s unclear what’s a continuation of what as it all converges toward the music of Ice Age and Soft Kill. Out of Bed is an album constantly climaxing. It’s a gorgeous view of a crashing plane that evens out in the air, the moments of grace before falling again.

           

Soft and Dumb’s live presence fuses Pissed Jeans style drumming with the tenderness of Floristor Mothers, giving the performance symmetry. Their latest single ‘never wanna’ is similarly balanced. It’s a little more linear but retains much of that same hurry up/slow down kind of habit, being made of both busy and paced intervals. 

It’s starts crystalline, grows fuzzier and cloudier and then circles back with momentum. A self-sustaining track, it is delinked from Out of Bed in a way that marks growth for the band, and possibly a new direction for their song structure and sound. Saved for last in the set and played the day before its release, ‘never wanna’ here is almost a denoucement, saying, this is where we’re headed.

                                       r.d.e


You can find out more and follow Soft and Dumb on Facebook and Instagram

Buy and download from the band on Bandcamp 

📷 Ryan Kuk



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