It had been four weeks since I’d last seen a show, and for lack of better phrasing, I was out of my fucking mind. Not that nothing had rolled through in that time — there’d been plenty of opportunities to get out — my mental and physical energy was occupied elsewhere. But when my weekend calendar seemed to be open just in time to catch Russian Circles at Radio City Music Hall, it was too cool an opportunity to pass up.

I mean, Russian Circles are a good band, but they’re still basically an underground act. Instrumental post-rock? The ads plastered up around the place were for people like Mike Tyson and Leonard Cohen. Even Coheed and Cambria, who were headlining the show, seemed like a stretch to me. I always thought of that as the kind of place you had to be Elton John before you could play. At very least James Taylor. Russian Circles you’d expect at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, or if you had to keep it in Manhattan, the Bowery Ballroom. To catch them at Radio City — in a place that big, in front of what would still be thousands of people even though they’d just be filing in at the time — seemed pretty special.

Even for that, the show was something of a departure for me. Usually, one idolizes seeing a bigger band at a smaller place — see any number of shows Brooklyn’s St. Vitus bar has put on in the last year-plus — so this, seeing a known but still relatively underground act at what’s indisputably a major venue, took the opposite route toward being an exception. Generally speaking, I don’t like big venues, big venue shows or big venue bands, but like I say, it had been four weeks and though there was other stuff going on I could’ve hit up, Russian Circles struck me as the one to catch.

It was the last night of a 28-date run, Russian Circles supporting Between the Buried and Me and Coheed and Cambria, though there was little of the end-of-tour pranking that I’d seen at Enslaved‘s recent Manhattan gig. Just as well, since Russian Circles essentially play in the dark and so any shenanigans might not have been seen by the crowd anyway, not to mention the heads-down-locked-in feel they have on stage. Before they went on, Coheed and Cambria‘s Claudio Sanchez and someone who appeared to be his wife, Chondra Echert-Sanchez, came out and did an acoustic, poppy take on “2’s My Favorite 1,” which apparently isn’t the teenybopper hit the title might imply, but a track of Coheed‘s latest album, Afterman: The Descension, released just at the start of the tour.

As someone who’s never even come close to being a Coheed and Cambria fan, I could’ve cared less, but the crowd, still milling in at the time — just about 7PM — went off, cell phones in the air to get the video. When the song was over, the Sanchezes said thanks and split on the quick and a couple minutes later, Russian Circles emerged, their stage lit by two single lightbulbs on either side — one in front of guitarist Mike Sullivan, one under the keyboard of bassist Brian Cook — and two floodlights behind drummer Dave Turncrantz. Last time I saw the band was in 2008 opening for Clutch‘s New Year’s tour at Starland Ballroom — not their crowd — so I knew they kept the lighting minimal, but at a place the size of Radio City, it was all the more accented, the shadows as expansive as the hall itself.

Russian Circles only played four songs, but in that time gave a fair sampling of their catalog. From 2008’s Station came opener “Harper Lewis,” followed by the title-track from 2009’s Geneva, which led into “Mlàdek,” the gallop-happy highlight from 2011’s Empros (review here), and from 2006’s debut, Enter, the closer “Death Rides a Horse.” For most of their time, I was up front taking pictures — a “first three songs” rule for a four-song set gave me a chuckle — so apart from having to crouch down in front of the stage, it probably wasn’t all that different from seeing them in a smaller room, but once I shuffled back to my seat for the duration of “Death Rides a Horse,” the sense of space really set in.

The three of them on the stage looked like they were playing in the mouth of some prehistoric megawhale. Their tones — Sullivan playing Verellen amps through Emperor cabinets, lest there should be any doubts of their dueling Chicago/Seattle origins — were full, but running through a house P.A. at what I don’t doubt was a don’t-be-louder-than-the-headliner level, so as I pulled my earplugs partially out to get a better listen, it was Turncrantz‘s snare that cut through most prominent. That said, Russian Circles managed to be ambient at Radio City Music Hall, a place scientifically engineered for acoustics but not for a wash of sound, and that seemed like a triumph. At very least, a hell of a way to end a tour.

Empros was by far the freshest on my mind of their material, so I was glad to catch “Mlàdek,” and their demeanor fit the mood of the material. There was no showy thrashing around, no arena-rock foot-on-the-monitor posturing. Russian Circles, apart from being older and perhaps more suspendered in the case of Cook, were much as I remembered them, which I was glad to see considering how it seemed to work for them last time around and on their lush studio work. They finished and said goodnight with as little ceremony as they’d walked out onto the dim stage, and I split likewise shortly thereafter.

It was not yet 8PM when I got back to my car. Probably I could’ve stayed and watched Between the Buried and Me or Coheed and Cambria, but yeah, no. I left the city like I was getting away with something. The Patient Mrs. and I went out to a late(r) dinner and still got to enjoy a decent portion of the evening, and I exhaled for what felt like the first time in two weeks, worried much less that my brain was going to explode for not having been out in so long, so on the existential and practical levels, this one was a win. Took an odd route to get there, but it got there, anyway.

Extra pics after the jump. Special thanks to Dave Clifford for making this happen and to you for reading.

Tags: Chicago, Empros, Manhattan, New York City, Radio City Music Hall, Russian Circles, Russian Circles Empros, Sargent House

This entry was posted on Monday, March 18th, 2013 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.