Rescheduled from an August 2018 cancellation, Circles Around The Sun made it worth the wait on their visit to Vermont, teasing and pleasing an audience that comfortably filled the Showcase Lounge at Higher Ground for over two hours on June 5th. By the time the performance was over, it was nigh on impossible to tell who enjoyed the experience the most.
Initially created as the sounds for set-break music during the 2015 Fare Thee Well concerts, the positive response to the music of CATS has resulted in two albums and regular touring on the part of a group headed by guitarist Neal Casal and keyboardist Adam MacDougall (once both linchpins of The Chris Robinson Brotherhood). Yet on the stage, this quartet is decidedly more than faintly funky as on Interludes For The Dead and Let It Wander. In fact, as the evening wore on, MacDougall’s forays on his clavinet brought more than one knowing grin around the small room and rightly so: Phish’s Page McConnell might well have been envious of (or maybe just flattered by) the syncopation in motion during those intervals.
Still, if it weren’t’ for the drumming of Mark Levy, who more than once brought to mind the tight percussion of Gregg Errico (Sly and the Family Stone, Weather Report), the rhythmic aspect of the music might not have been so pronounced. Similarly, bassist Dan Horne, he of the Bernie Sander t-shirt, may have been the unsung hero of the group: almost subliminal in its impact, the sound of his instrument reinforced the pulse of the songs as they evolved to surprisingly intense levels toward the end of the single set. In the early going too, his insistent playing kept the trance-like “Hallucinate A Solution” from floating off and dissolving into the mist circulating above the stage.
Of course, the otherworldly sounds MacDougall coaxed from his banks of keyboards has more than a little to do with that atmosphere, as did the battery of lights swirling, flashing and blinking off the five mirror balls arranged around the tiny stage. But it was guitarist Neal Casal who drove home the interstellar air that increasingly permeated so much of this foursome’s intuitive musicianship: especially when he used a slide, as on “Saturday’s Children:” the often corrosive textures emanating from his instrument (when he wasn’t flicking funk figures) meshed with those arising from the intense concentration exhibited by his now ex-counterpart in the CRB (MacDougall recently exited that group).
Filling the air and enveloping an audience where heads were bobbing almost immediately and bodies swaying increasingly frenetically during the course of the show, Circles Around The Sun upped the ante of their approach almost imperceptibly this cool summer evening, so that, toward the end of “One For Chuck,” the consistent but fleeting references to songs of the Grateful Dead almost seemed an illusion rather than outright teases (Casal did quote the Beatles’ “You Never Give Me Your Money” at one point—or was it “Something”?). Nevertheless, if originals (sic) including “On My Mind,” “Halicarnassus” and “Gilbert’s Groove” rightfully evoked “Here Comes Sunshine,” “Row Jimmy” and “Estimated Prophet” (not necessarily in that order), it was all the more reason for the audience to exit the venue into some soft summer rain with “nothing left to do but smile smile smile.”
Photos Courtesy Ross Mickel – Bootleggers Beware
