Power, Air, and the Machine
Carly Meyers and Adam Gertner are ROAR!
Words by George Wilde. Photographs by Brian Hockensmith, Mallory Turner, and Noè Cugny.
From the looks of it — criss-crossed wires, umpteen gadgets with blinking lights, and cherry-red translucent drum shells — we’re in for a synth pop journey. With a face framed by long blonde hair and cropped bangs, Carly Meyers stares intently at all of it as she adjusts the knobs and switches on her devices while communicating last-minute vocal equalizer notes to the sound engineer.
“Hey everybody! We’re ROAR! and we’re about to start!”
Surrounded by stacks of pedals, midi controllers and synthesizers, Adam Gertner, the rhythmic core and sound-designer half of Roar! shouts unamplified to the audience as he dons red headphones to signal the beginning of the set. Meyers blasts a few notes on the trombone as she manipulates the filter effect with her feet while Gertner cues the first song with a crashing drum fill. ROAR! strikes with power and precision.
Gasa Gasa hosts tonight’s event, a three-band installment of the weekly New Orleans experimental and new music series Progression. It is a celebration of sorts, not only of female performers — who lead the bands on the bill: ROAR!, Tele Novella, Toonces — but also for Carly and Adam who are making a limited local-only release of their new full-length album “La-Di-Da.” Audience members spanning a wide age range immediately start to move with the first song.
Meyers fills all available space. She is sonically unrelenting, with heavy foot-triggered bass lines and simultaneous searing trombone solos that sit on a dense bed of arpeggio synths and percussion loops cued by Adam. Physically and spatially, she bursts with energy. Full-body punk rock dance moves with headbanging hair twirls, monitor-mounted mic screams, and dive-bomb backbends to the floor — and back.
Playful lyrics and whimsical melodies confirm the synth-pop mode. Song forms stay within package limits, though odd meter and unexpected rhythmic treats are woven throughout the set. But come face-to-face with Carly’s raw fiery energy, and it’s easy to see how one could be swept up in a punk-rock fervor, interspersing indie bouncing and swaying with a mosh pit. Tonight’s crowd of twenty to thirty people relatively early on a Tuesday night doesn’t accommodate the mosh pit very well but that doesn’t hold Carly back from 45 minutes of non-stop rock power performance. Gertner’s expert drum fills evoke those same themes that contrast yet dovetail with the contemporary electronic soundscape. All of this only to be blown to bits by Carly’s fiery trombone solos, powerfully executed with the verve and tone absorbed as if by osmosis through New Orleans streets that ROAR! calls home.
We live in a moment where nostalgia, isolation amidst a social information overload, and ever-present overtones of irony come together to thwart simple identity-expression. Constantly revising our images, we shape the impression the we make on the world and offer it up for review. The process is even more pronounced in the music world, where personal and professional blend together, in front of the scenes and behind them. And so ROAR! is a band of a time and a place. Defined by an ever-expanding network of computer-designed sound, where electronic performances drift further and further from the point of sonic creation, the time is now: 2016. The place is here. Here in the ether of the internet-connected synth-singer dream. Here in the world of endless digital experimentation. And here, pushing air through a metal horn and a skintight drumhead in a club are two people making the music unfold right before our eyes, assisted by but not beholden to their machines.
