Stimmerman
TV Eye
Ridgewood, Queens 2/28/2024
For a long-enough-time fan of a band, there’s pique little joy in witnessing them play to a small crowd. All the empty space in the venue, a confirmation of all the folks you don’t yet know — and how fortunate you are to have been one of the lucky ones to find out. It’s all even better when the set is comprised of mostly new music:
Stimmerman’s set Wednesday night blasts off with a tune I did not recognize, and for a moment I was again one of the missing uninitiated. My ears struggled to wrap around the hierarchy between Eva LaWitts’s grind and pummel bass, the two guitars (Chris Krasnow and Gannon Ferrell) weaving bar-wire lines across each other, and Theo Walentiny’s shrieking synth. The drums from Connor Parks were the only thing seeming to hold the gargantuan sound down and grounded, until Eva’s voice came in to stich the system together completely.
Eva LaWitts’s Stimmerman is a band like few others. The tradition they spring from is a fertile one, and Stimmerman makes the most of the available fecundity.
Their heavy, all-fucks-given variety of jazz-inflected heavy rock is built on the sort of abstracted ethos of Sonny Sharrock, ’70s Ornette Coleman, Mister Bungle — a note here for fear of the sound you may be conjuring in your head: this is not the knowing kitsch, half-ironically complex, fetishistically idiomatic fusion offered by acts like Hiatus Kaiyote, Jacob Collier, Domi & JD Beck, Snarky Puppy, Vulfpeck, or Pomplamoos. Stimmerman is not atonal, odd-meter disco or chiptune meets J‑Dilla or a hyper-tight variety show band goofing through meme-lyrics. If I were tasked with nailing down, in as few words as possible, what the sound is at it’s most fundamental, I’d have to say something like ‘Pop-Punk left in the back of the fridge for too long, the curdling growth of which ought to spawn a new branch of musical mycology…’
The difficulty of Stimmerman is highly rewarding, and any recognizable element, any reference to sounds previously heard, is buried in the structure of the tunes, the attitude of the performance. We’re not playing look-at-me games of hipper-than-thou. Even through the angular riffage of tunes like It Shows and Mark Twain from their 2019 standard-setting record Goofballs, or the building bruisy iridescence of Hungry God and Promise U Will from last year’s too short but infinitely relistenable (and I have relistened infinitely…) Undertaking, Stimmerman never strays from the leaden crush that makes heavy music as cathartic as it is. The joy of their music is in no small way the frankly bizarre vocabulary they employ in navigating their tunes toward these huge breaking moments — and, for me, this sets them apart from the other music-nerd acts I referenced above.
For all their technical prowess, of which there is plenty to go around — LaWitts is one of those bass players that seems just as intent on tearing the instrument apart as they are on playing it — Stimmerman’s complexities move beyond showmanship and athleticism. Within their music is an angle on the millennial malaise I’ve rarely seen explored:
…My whole life,
I was exceptional in
My own mind
And no one ever told me
Otherwise…
Eva and company — as well as myself — are children of the ’90s, of Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” policy and gifted child programs. This historical and cultural position has been expounded upon quite a lot as our generation has grown up, but usually with from the vantage of “If I’m so gifted, then why am I not special as an adult?” This is present in Stimmerman’s lyrical content, as shown above, but inside the music, this giftedness is on obvious display. The encouragement of whole generation to think differently, invent new rules, follow the god-given gut, only to find out there’s no market for difference. If this grief, rage, and general aesthetic can all be sourced in some small way from this fact, then Stimmerman is no doubt doing something forever special. They’ve captured the full scope of an incredibly difficult to express feeling.
Ever since I stumbled upon an Instagram reel in 2019 of Eva shredding some wild shit on the bass guitar, I’ve been hooked on the band’s music. Easily my favorite local band and my most played jams of last five years — there’s a long time during the Covid lockdown where all I was listening to everyday were Bach Masses and Goofballs. Describing it is a fool’s errand. Just know that they’re loud, sour, and mean everything they play and sing. It’s tearful, powerful stuff.
