Black-lit evenings don’t always have to be shrill, garish affairs, as the Entrance Band proved Monday at the Hi-Dive. Photo by Sasha Eisenman.
At the on Monday evening, a gentleman in a white fur hat stepped onstage. He pressed a few buttons, wiggled some hardware, and hid his collection of whiskey shots somewhere behind the amps. He then quietly excused himself as an electric hum swelled to the ceiling. Two concertgoers, fresh from the cold, craned their necks as they approached the stage. Seeing nothing, they exclaimed, “It’s ghosts!”
Guy Blakeslee — otherwise known as — eventually returned, his band in tow. Clad in a glittering sweater, Blakeslee pulled a guitar from his quiver and slung it over his shoulder, wrong way out. A lefty? No, but perhaps he’d picked up a few hints from Elizabeth Cotten — Pete Seeger’s surreptitiously guitar-coveting housekeeper. But that’s another tale. With one wrong-way strum, the band, all of ’em unabashed longhairs, immediately growled to life.
Blakeslee’s groovy bleat skated easily over the bass soup his bandmates were stirring, and to great effect. With aplomb, the trio trod merrily towards the Valley of Rock — a mythical corner of the world where dragons circle the purplish skies, warrior babes congregate, and inanimate objects start talking jive. In a manner of speaking, shit got heavy. Being too low on the blood n’ guts-o-meter, the music couldn’t have been mistaken for purebred metal. Nevertheless, while it didn’t nuke any eardrums or melt any cochleas, its DNA was strung with metal’s lean musculature.
Despite the fact that Entrance was the leader of the troupe both in name and in deed, it was Derek James’ punchy drumming and bassist Paz Lenchantin’s effortless writhing that sparked considerable interest. Appearing as though they had disassociated from their bodies, the two carried their rhythm-section duty with remarkable serenity. Lenchantin was especially mesmerizing, her thigh-length tresses shrouding her face as her fingers lept up and down the frets. During particularly sublime bridges, she’d roll her neck, swinging a massive arc of hair and working into a rapture that would end in a knee-first tilt onto the floor. It should have come as no surprise that Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label picked them up in 2009.
As the evening progressed, the band’s energy began to crackle with new violence. Blakeslee, Lenchantin and James hustled and gyrated with a fervor that, worn on another band, could be mistaken for arena-size affectation. Murky, impassioned, and exquisitely gnarly, the sound didn’t take us to the battlefield but to other dimensions instead.
The band could feel it, too, as evidenced by the loosened limbs and Entrance’s exposed nude torso in the latter half of the set (when squeezing through psychic wormholes, it’s safest to relax and shed a few clothes). By the last song, a two-way frenzy had reached its peak — the band conjured a few demons, and audience beer guts wobbled in adulation. It had been a brawny, black-lit kind of evening; luckily, it was spent not in somebody’s smoky basement but in a warm, dark bar.
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Alex Edgeworth is a Denver-based freelance writer and regular contributor to Reverb.
