circles // when the big river floods

Circles
When The Big River Floods
Well Below Records

I think it’s fair to say that barring some great 90s Sub Pop-esque cataclysm in this city’s music scene, Philadelphia rock music is never exactly going to make sense. In the fifteen-twenty block radius that constitutes the “hipper”/whiter parts of West Philadelphia, there might be over a hundred fledgling punk and experimental rock bands forming and playing out of various basements and rehearsal spaces. I would suspect that three-quarters of these bands make music out of boredom or as a joke, half of them will probably never play a show, and only a handful of them will actually get to the point of seriously playing and putting out releases. Nonetheless, out of all the artists that have actually had their shit together enough to eek their way onto my (or anyone else’s) radar, there’s one thing that I think is sometimes really, really striking about our local fare: almost nothing is ever the same.

It’s not exactly fair to say that Philadelphia has no “sound” exactly—the fact that this city has produced two somewhat known, somewhat similar bands like Need New Body and Man Man might hint at a certain local flavor in the work of some of our city’s hipster art-weirdos, and the countless sloppy punk bands here might all sound the same by definition. But beyond a few, almost coincidental points of convergence within the punk/experimental scene here and there, for the most part we are a city of iconoclasts—a single space that somehow contains the slap-stick calliope punk of The Low Budgets, the jolting/daydreaming experimental rock of Make A Rising, and the metal-inflected dance-party of Pony Pants. Rather than a single, clearly defined line, Philadelphia’s music scene is and may forever be a tangled knot of loose threads.

This fact was driven home to me when I was listening to the copy of Circles’ When The Big River Floods that was passed on to me by their singer/guitarist Nick Mellevoi. Circles is yet another interesting twist in Philadelphia rock music that basically takes traditional rock and roll/indie rock singer-songwriting and punctuates it with the looseness and technical proficiency of this city’s homegrown experimental free jazz. As an album When The Big River Floods has a lot going for it, the musical ideas at work in it are generally well-conceived and impeccably executed, Nick’s song-writing consistently holds its own, and the songs are full of instrumental richness and gloriously ecstatic rock moments. Particularly successful in all of these regards is the album’s opening track “Away with the tide,” a song about an apocalyptic flood set against a beautiful mess of down-tempo guitar riffing, drum crashes, and trombones.

In the sheer terms of their ability to place high-concept, heavily-trained music techniques within a totally non-pretentious stylistic frame—one that’s neither afraid to rock or jam the fuck out—what Circles does more than earns my respect. Through their occasional roughness and their honesty of purpose, Circles has born into this world yet another paradoxical archetype of Philadelphia rock music: a band playing riffed-out bar rock for kids that listen to Ornette Coleman. However they’ve managed arrived at this point and however amazing the music they can make is, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will ever be able follow them.