To my knowledge, The Book of Knots hadn’t done a live show since July 2007, when they took the stage at Manhattan’s Gramercy Theatre with a slew of guests to support their then-new second album, Traineater. I was there and it was grand. From Jon Langford (The Mekons) to Carla Bozulich (Evangelista) to Aaron Lazar (The Giraffes), the stage was in constant flux around Book of Knots steady members Carla Kihlstedt (vocals, violin), Joel Hamilton (guitar), Tony Maimone (bass) and Matthias Bossi (drums), grounded only by the consistent brilliance of the woefully underdiscovered material, songs like “Midnight,” “Hands of Production” and “The Captain’s Cup” ringing out through the not-packed but thoroughly-appreciative room in what I to this day consider one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, hands down. And I’ve seen a few.

Joined by Faun Fables and Skeleton Key, what may indeed have been The Book of Knots‘ second gig in six years was a different kind of family affair. I walked into Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory — my first time there since it moved from its old location on Leonard St. in Manhattan — to find Faun Fables already on stage and a goodly portion through their set, the duo of Dawn McCarthy and Nils Frykdahl seamlessly blending mountain folk spirit with art rock theatricality — both wore gowns and McCarthy brought one of her young daughters on stage while the other slept in the audience — and a fittingly earthy vibe. I recognized Frykdahl‘s voice immediately from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, of which Book of Knots‘ Kihlstedt and Bossi were also members, though other than his vocals, Faun Fables shares almost nothing in common with the sadly defunct, ultra-dark avant metal outfit.

Still, they were more than enjoyable in that look-at-those-very-talented-weirdos kind of way, McCarthy echoing her own yodels in the closer with striking believability, if not much setup for Skeleton Key, a long-running NY-native post-noise rock four-piece (with whom Bossi once played) with jagged riffs and a double-dose of percussion in a standard kit and secondary cymbals, canisters and other found items that were thoroughly banged on. Most of what they played came from their first LP in a decade, last year’s Gravity is the Enemy — the material striking a blend between New York City’s ’90s noise-punk lineage and the heavier end of indie, without fear of the occasional rockabilly twang or slide guitar interjection — but between percussionist Benjamin Clapp recruiting Kihlstedt and others to run through the crowd with big paper mache marshmallow heads on and returning later to take a French horn solo in a similar fashion — they were hardly short on the avant elements either. Actually, knowing almost nothing about the band going into their set, they were exciting to watch.

Bassist/vocalist/founder Erik Sanko announced toward the end of their time that his mother has passed away on Sunday, and that added further emotionality to the already-striking “Roses,” the closer from Gravity is the Enemy and penultimate inclusion before “Wide Open” from 1997’s Fantastic Spikes through Balloon. When they were finished and Sanko came back out to retrieve his bass, the crowd goaded them into one more song, so they did “Roost in Peace” from 2002’s Obtanium, clicking sticks to keep the rhythm under the folksy melody line and memorable chorus. They seemed glad for the chance to do the encore, even if somewhat surprised to have been asked.

In 2011, The Book of Knots made their debut on Ipecac with Garden of Fainting Stars (review here), their third album behind the aforementioned Traineater on Anti- and their 2004 self-titled debut, released by Texas imprint Arclight. It was the final installment in a vague thematic trilogy, the first record centering around the nautical, the second the rust belt, the third aerospace — sea, land and air, roughly — and whether or not they’ll follow it with further tales of industrial decay and cruelties both personal and at-large remains to be seen,  but they hardly sounded finished at Knitting Factory. With guitarist/backing vocalist Jon Evans and keyboardist/backing vocalist Michael Jinno, Kihlstedt, Bossi, Maimone and Hamilton took the stage and bled before the audience even realized they were starting into the dreary moodiness of “All this Nothing” from Garden of Fainting Stars.

“We are purveyors of that type of music,” Bossi announced on mic from behind his kit, and sure enough, the remainder of the night proved him right, through from their very beginnings, The Book of Knots have been a richly dynamic band, moving from these ambient, still-melodic droning sections of sparse atmospherics to intense, crushing distortion and correspondingly weighted rhythmic thud. Rules are minimal and followed as whims dictate, but the songs are cohesive, and in the case of this set, flowed well together. It was late when they got going, and some of the setlist was cut out to make room, but “Tugboat” from the first album and the Traineater title-track showcased excellently the sonic variety in The Book of Knots‘ approach, Maimone‘s steady low end, Evans and Hamilton‘s guitars, Jinno‘s keys and even Bossi‘s drums and vocals all coming into and out of focus along the way.

Kihlstedt, who also has an album forthcoming with Bossi under the duo guise of Rabbit Rabbit, did most of the singing, her voice smooth and bluesy over “Traineater” and no less suited to the more active Garden opener “Microgravity,” which followed the spoken idiosyncrasies of “Hands of Production” and foreshadowed some of the heft to come in the latter half of the set. Frykdahl returned for a vocal/guitar spot on “Moondust Must” — he was the night’s only guest — which even the band acknowledged would be the most upbeat sounding thing they’d play. It was, and though I never got to see Sleepytime Gorilla Museum during their day, I was thankful to get a glimpse at some of their expanded roots in Frykdahl and Kihlstedt‘s combined singing.

The high points were still to come, however. I had been glad to see “Pearl Harbor” on the setlist. I’ll confess it had been a while since I broke out the self-titled for a listen, so I didn’t remember precisely why I was glad to see it, but I knew that it being there was something to be happy about, and once they kicked into the slow, full-weight drudgery of the track’s second half, I immediately remembered the reason. Bossi pounded out a stomping but complex rhythm, Hamilton kept his I’m-a-producer’s cool while Evans punished his guitar with each strum on the other side of the stage, but it was Maimone‘s bass that left the greatest impression, each swell of the riff cycle resulting in a “voom” you could feel in your chest standing in front of the stage. It was even more satisfying for not having it so fresh in my memory, and a reminder of how much I lived with that self-titled when I first heard it, now nine years ago.

They followed and closed out with really the only song that possibly could have followed “Pearl Harbor,” “Salina” from Traineater, which never fails to send a shiver up my spine. It was a highlight in 2007 and remained one last night, and though it was late, I couldn’t help but hope for an encore of pretty much whatever they wanted to do — loud, quiet, whatever. No such luck on that, but “Salina” was more than one could ask for without being greedy, all six players locking into its build and noisy, deconstructed ending, Kihlstedt delivering one last highlight performance.

I already had a copy of Garden of Fainting Stars, and though I wanted to hit the merch table and see if there was anything to be had from the members of Book of Knots‘ other projects — be it Rabbit Rabbit, Two Foot Yard, Pere Ubu, etc. — it wasn’t to be, and I shuffled out of the Knitting Factory and back down the block to where I’d parked. It may not have been the same scale as six years ago, but for the chance to see this band as a band, almost entirely on their own, the show only confirmed for me how massively underappreciated The Book of Knots have been over the course of their time together. Not that I didn’t feel that way anyhow, but it’s nice to be proven right every now and again.

More pics after the jump. Thanks for reading.

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The third installment in New York experimental rockers The Book of Knots’ alleged trilogy of concept albums, Garden of Fainting Stars, released by Ipecac Recordings, follows 2007’s Traineater and 2004’s Book of Knots (issued via Anti- and Arclight, respectively) and concludes the thematic string of “sea, land, air” the band undertook as its initial project. Like its predecessors, Garden of Fainting Stars is rife with an extremely particular atmosphere and artistry, and probably has more in common sonically with the second album than the first, on which the core four-piece of Carla Kihlstedt (vocals and violin mostly; also of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Two-Foot Yard), Joel Hamilton (guitar and engineer), Tony Maimone (bass; also of Pere Ubu) and Matthias Bossi (drums, synth and occasional vocals; also of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) was still feeling its way into what has become over the subsequent (now) two albums The Book of Knots’ sound. That sound, typified by invented instrumentation – Kihlstedt plays a “marxophone” on the track “Yeager’s Approach” – and the integration of an array of guest performers, makes Garden of Fainting Stars a subtle but complex listen, and in just 40 minutes, The Book of Knots draws upon a Cold War sense of fear, American arrogance and wonder at modernity to cover a wide berth of moods and feelings, all the while remaining consistent in terms of songwriting and overall flow. As did Traineater from Book of Knots, Garden of Fainting Stars justifies every minute of the time it took to put it out.

Heavy moments like those bookending the album in opener “Microgravity” and closer “Obituary for the Future” offset an array of ambient tracks, and if nothing else, Garden of Fainting Stars proves The Book of Knots have amassed some good friends along the members’ varied creative travels. The likes of Mike Watt, Blixa Bargeld (of The Bad Seeds/Einstürzende Neubauten) and Ipecac owner and Faith No More frontman Mike Patton show up here, alongside others including Nils Frykdahl and Dawn McCarthy of Faun Fables (the former also of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum), actor/singer Aaron Lazar (whose performance on “Third Generation Pink Slip” was a highlight of Traineater), vocalist Elyas Khan (Nervous Cabaret), stage director/writer Allen Willner, guitarist Trey Spruance (Secret Chiefs 3/ex-Mr. Bungle), John Vanderslice (Mk Ultra/The Mountain Goats), John Davis (Superdrag), Shahzad Ismaily (Secret Chiefs 3), engineer Ian Pelicci (who’s worked with Kihlstedt and Bossi in their theatrical excursions)… and more.  It’s an overwhelming amount of people, as the personnel list and publishing credits in the liner notes show, and one doesn’t at all envy Hamilton the task he had in mixing it, but somehow, The Book of Knots come out with an album that’s as cohesive as it is challenging, and although each track by the very nature of who’s contributing offers something different, the record as a whole retains its central theme and is drawn together by it. Of the total 10 tracks, only “Microgravity,” “All This Nothing” and “Nebula Rasa” feature Kihlstedt, Hamilton, Maimone and Bossi alone, and even there the instrumentation is varied. So yeah, you could easily say there’s a lot going on with Garden of Fainting Stars. I wouldn’t argue.

Nonetheless, and perhaps either in spite of or in complement to their experimental and ambient stretches, The Book of Knots leave room for several righteous choruses, striking a balance across Garden of Fainting Stars as though to give their audience something to hook onto in the face of the material’s vast breadth. Kihlstedt recounts the tale of launching monkeys into space on “Microgravity,” centered around the melodic titular question of whether or not they’ll survive, leaving room for both Hamilton’s guitar crunch and a spoken part from Bossi that’s not dissimilar from what he did on the Traineater cut “Hands of Production.” It’s telling that, even with all the contributing personalities that begin to pile up as soon as Bargeld begins his narration of “Drosophila Melangaster,” Garden of Fainting Stars would launch with just the four players in the band proper. Not that they’re starting off simple, but a foundation is established with “Microgravity” on which the rest of the album builds, starting with the aforementioned “Drosophila Melanogaster,” which undercuts the anxiety of the opener by reveling in the banality of commercial air travel as it is today. Bargeld assumes the role of passenger waiting for a variety of flights, reading as though from a journal flight numbers and recounting tales of fruit flies in his drinks and the lack of space in economy, eventually launching into drunken singing as The Book of Knots behind him pick up from the foreboding ambience of the beginning into the swaying, otherworldly weirdness that makes up the end of the track, giving way to “Moondust Must,” on which Frykdahl and McCarthy offer lead vocals with a group backing them for probably Garden of Fainting Stars’ most infectious chorus – the lines “Moondust looks like gunpowder/Moondust smells like gunpowder/Moondust tastes like gunpowder/Moondust must be gunpowder” approaching nursery rhyme memorability even as they mock the sort of down-home ignorance of “the farther shore” and religious ideas of walking among the dead in the verse. “Moondust Must” has a bouncing rhythm to it, and is simple on its surface, but there’s an underlying absurdity at play as well, and the amount of noise thrown in the mix behind Frykdahl and McCarthy is consistent with both what backed Bargeld on “Drosophila Melanogaster” and what next comes to the fore on “Lissajous Orbit.”

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