Neckbolt, Hissom, and Ivory Tusk
Whittier Bar
Oct. 2, 2023
Oklahoma music is broadly famous for its country megastars, for Red Dirt and Woody Guthrie, for Leon Russell and his Tulsa Sound, but you may also know we are, in some sects, supremely weird. All-black, hallway-shaped bars with questionable bathrooms are where the Flaming Lips, Chainsaw Kittens, and BRONCHO found footholds that would catapult them well past our borders. They’re where tenured Oklahoma acts like post-hardcore band Traindodge and doom metalheads Rainbows Are Free can still pack any random weeknight before embarking on tours and festival dates. In my estimation, these little rooms are where discovery-hungry listeners are most likely to congregate unspecifically, leaning into the musical curation of the venue to promise something they’ll at best find compelling and at minimum have never heard before.
Whittier Bar is positioning itself in this ilk more than ever with a calendar full of punk, experimental, hardcore, metal, and conventionally genreless bands from across the country that otherwise may not have somewhere else to land in Tulsa. Monday night’s show was a prime example of that with an eclectic three-band bill, one from Austin, Texas, and two locals. The common thread between them? Noise as expression.
Opener Hissom is the solo project of Tulsan Dustin Charles. It’s an exercise in modular synthesizing that isn’t songs, per se, but the live building of a soundscape in real time. It’s more akin to watching an aggressively escalating live painting for your ears than watching a band. Without a discernible melody, Hissom managed to capture the tension a listener might get from more traditional formats.
Ivory Tusk, a relatively new Tulsa band, was a late addition to the bill and also performed last, a fitting sequence for a noise show if you wish to ramp up your volume intake as a night progresses. They’re a three-piece, metal-ish, self-described as bringing a “beautifully harsh soundscape,” which rings true. The instrument selection for a heavy band is fascinating, with full-stack amplifiers onstage not for guitars but for bass and a Roland Juno. There’s screaming and there’s melody, there’s the interplay between musicians you’d expect from a rock band, but then there’s the upturning of those conventions with volume and abrasiveness used as instruments of their own sort.
Touring headliner Neckbolt recently put out a new LP called Dream Dump, and that is also how I would describe its music. As in dreams, there’s a skeleton of familiar context — in this case, rock ‘n’ roll — that’s then stretched and pulled into the fantastical. It’s unsurprising that the offstage careers of the band’s Texan members range from the freewheeling (visual artist) to the mathy (engineer, business development). Where the twain shall meet: the two Oklahomans in the band, guitarist Kilyn Massey and drummer Brent Hodge (both members of shoegaze band Power Pyramid) are in the creative cohort at Old Blood Noise Endeavors, an OKC-based boutique guitar effects pedal and media company that specializes in turning solder and knobs into otherworldly instrumental sounds.
Neckbolt’s set is pop guitar riffs that jerk and twist, flamboyant and scrappy and catchy and upsetting. Anchored by Hodge’s drum kit, the other players in the six-piece are half of the time playing music and the other half of the time doing God-knows-what, using pedals and samples to manipulate their instruments — most notably live wire frontman James Roo’s voice — into sounds you aren’t sure you recognize. It’s wild and confusing fun, psych rock protocol fused with Technicolor weirdness.
The crowd, sparse but sweet, lapped up every brash bloop, every snare hit and every yell for every act, clapping — if they could tell when the songs were over, which was not obvious every time — and listening intently until the last drone faded away.
