The Double – Dawn Of The Double

Can you dance and meditate at the same time? Talking to one of The Double before a Brooklyn gig in the summer of 2014, I was told they were going to play a “dance piece.” I wasn’t sure how to take that, since neither member is particularly known for dance music or dance accompaniment, but it slowly began to make sense as I watched their stunning set. The music struck an odd balance between perpetual motion and perpetual stasis: the drummer, Jim White (Dirty Three, Venom P Stinger), maintained a modified Bo Diddley beat, switching between the snare and the toms after long stretches on each, while the guitarist, Emmett Kelly (Cairo Gang, Ty Segall & the Muggers), stuck steadfastly to an E chord (or mainly the e’s and b’s of an E chord, to be more accurate). They took the underpinning of countless rock and roll songs—the rhythm section--and decisively moved it to the foreground. It soon became clear that this wasn’t going to be the average concert of discrete songs or pieces--so the question then became how long they would sustain the groove for.