Green Shoelace » Daniel Francis Doyle @ The Smell, Los Angeles

Daniel Francis Doyle @ The Smell, Los Angeles – June 14, 2009

Friday June 19th 2009 @ 1:33 pm by Chanelle Johnson

Among a small crowd of grungy hipsters, Daniel Francis Doyle looks like your unassuming neighbor. Sporting cargo shorts and actual, prescription glasses, he sticks out without trying. It becomes even clearer once he plays, too, that he’s the one thing in the mix that isn’t like the others. Sandwiched between more standard, lo-fi drum and guitar-driven, melodic rock acts, Doyle takes the floor at The Smell in Los Angeles alone.

The initial appeal of Daniel’s set is just seeing what in the world is about to happen.

The thing is: for anyone looking to get to know beforehand, his MySpace page boasts a minimal display. There a few pictures of Daniel and some of his older songs, but although the genre listed on his page is just ‘rock/rock/rock,’ the first track to auto-play exposes Doyle’s tendencies toward noise experimentation and slightly off-beat patterns. With that as a pre-cursor, it’s hard to figure out what to expect, but as soon as everyone has moved in close to listen, Doyle blows the room back with a scatterbrained, snare-heavy drum intro.

He’s skilled. A modern one-man band, Doyle’s music does stray more towards the more experimental, almost unmelodic rhythms and arrangements, but live, the barrage comes across more cohesively than on record. One huge help is being able to witness the methods behind Doyle’s seeming chaos. Online it’s hard to tell whether Doyle has intentionally structured songs to sound off-beat, or if he just hasn’t yet perfected his use of GarageBand. The material he plays in promotion of his new album, We Bet Our Money On You, is off-kilter enough to be jarring but not so much that listeners can always easily tell he isn’t actually trying to go for something more pop-friendly and just missing the mark.

Live, audience members watch this Austin native go from the drums to recording guitar loops on the spot, and then jumping back to use the automation to give the illusion of other players without missing a beat. Doyle’s quick, focused, and he’s so enthusiastic about playing and yelling lyrics over the music that after just the intro, his t-shirt has begun to soak through. A song like “Street Stress” kick-starts with relentless crash cymbals and moves into a stuttered beat that hooks and grinds at the senses simultaneously, inciting the same kinds of emotions only something like city traffic and commotion only can.

Doyle also knows the rules of ebb and flow. In the middle of his half-hour set, he slows the momentum way down with a dreamy ballad. Turned almost away from the audience, Doyle sings about a complicated relationship, both deriding and lamenting the experience as he sings ‘Since then I’ve been a little pig/rolling in shit/and it’s not so bad’. It’s the only time any of the lyrics are especially intelligible, sort of bittersweet and entrancing. Throughout the rest of the music, where the instrument almost suffers from disjointed vocals, Doyle’s voice becomes arresting. Everyone leans in a little closer again, but as soon as the song is finished, Doyle busts up the somber moment to get right back to drums and sharp guitar riffs, and he cruises through an overwhelming finish. It takes a moment to understand where he’s coming from, but Daniel Francis Doyle proves he knows the best way to win people over it just not to give them too long to breathe. He’s from the same ilk as a band like Hella, sometimes dipping into arrangements that take a cue from Explosions in the Sky. Complete with rough, staccato singing after John Darnielle’s own heart, it’s hard to deny that,as confusing as Daniel Francis Doyle it, he also inspires a deep and unavoidable joy.