Choirs

This Choirs review is a big deal to me. I have been talking about doing a review on Choirs since October when Schuyler Heinsohn told me about his band and their new addition Bryan Powell (former Guards. Guaaards). He refused to tell me anything about the genre of the band at the time and doubted I would like it.

Choirs played at The 1011 alongside Triptych, AOD and Televangelist, which is an odd combo but I knew I had to be there. So about Choirs, there are two guitarists, Schuyler Heinsohn and Zachary Franco, bass player Bryan Powell, drummer Wesley Powers and the vocalist Matthew Scaggs. While I’m standing in the crowd absorbing their first song I keep thinking to myself, “These boys are doing what the bands I liked in high school were doing but better”. At the time, I listened to hardcore and screamo bands both local and national. But this band has a garage band, ‘we obviously aren’t professionals’, sound but have the potential to rise up to an underground national level. I was really impressed by Choirs even with their screaming, incomprehensible lyrics (because you know how I feel about that).

This band has a juvenile ‘I’m in a high school band’ style and ‘I’m in a boy band’ look, which makes this hardcore band similar to Illustrations. Some have compared their sound to Thursday, although I do not agree. I really just kept thinking this is what those little local bands in my town were trying to do. This is small town local, ‘I want to play as hard as I can and scream as much as I can’, taken to the next level. Now I don’t know if my giddy, happy, anticipation mood influenced my interpretation of their sound but I’m going to say it didn’t. Seeing Choirs actually put me in a good mood, the crowd was full of good energy. The band was just support for their eccentric singer, Matthew Scaggs that enjoyed flinging his scrawny body and bold vocals across the room at people, at walls, at the floor. Until the very end all the members really stayed in their place while Scaggs terrorized the crowd, causing a scene, making a show. The end of the show, the final song, was really when everyone broke loose, Heinsohn and Powell broke out of their little corner and joined their front-man in the crowd closing out the set with more than we expected… or maybe more than I expected.

Without Scaggs’ staggering vocals the band would be just another good band: interesting, one time is enough but really good--kind of band. But together as a band Choirs is out to show you what they’ve got.