Pop Music Reviews : Some Static Songs From Birdsongs

In the abstruse world of post-graduate rock ‘n’ roll, there are art-school bands and there are music-school bands. Where art-school bands play music almost as performance art, usually as an ironic comment on the state of pop culture, music-school bands have a musical agenda instead--usually to prove that Stravinsky rhythms and Bartok harmonies are valid in a rock context. And usually they’re wrong.

Art-school bands, which include the Beatles, the Who and Einsturzende Neubauten, frequently rock. Music-school bands, which often turn out music of beauty and great formal complexity, usually lack freshness.

At Bogart’s on Tuesday, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, perhaps the prototypical music-school band, made its first West Coast appearance in a decade and demonstrated why it’s in more demand as an artist-in-residence than as a nightclub performer. Noses buried in the charts, the quartet of music-reading, 7th-chord-inverting, odd-meter-using Boston musicians had all the stage presence of the Eastman Wind Ensemble.

The Birdsongs formula is static: a piano vamp, mechanized drums, a thick drone. Over that a modal, long-note melody plays on a sax or a synth, and eventually the whole thing accelerates like an amok carousel. The result was new music for people who don’t like new music, slightly amusing in rock terms and utterly banal in classical ones. You felt like you should have gotten college credit for sitting through the set.