Words by Jason Lee.
Mary Shelley don’t just play a room. They play the room. Playing the room including all its inhabitants like an instrument. They stroke it, beat on it, pluck it. Just like with other types of instruments so get yr mind out of the gutter for once.
Give ‘em rafters and they’ll get climbed. Give ‘em a stage and it’ll get dived. And while MS is hardly the first band to play rooms in this manner it’s especially convincing when they do it cuz, I mean, we’ve even seen ‘em play in the great outdoors and heck they still “play the room” whether it’s a block party or busy urban intersection from dancing with passerbys to greeting residents on their stoop with a microphone in hand the band make it feel like yr in a small black box theater watching an experimental one-act play whatever the setting cuz they take over the space in question so completely.
Or to put it in more theatrical terms: Mary Shelley play to the cheap seats. Even when there are no cheap seats. Or seats at all. The end effect is equally intimate and distanced. Elevated and debased. Satiric and deadly serious. Like a production of Waiting for Godot if Samuel Beckett had been a bratty punk which he kind of was.
So yeah, they’re pretty good live. And if you don’t have the means or the proximity to verify it first hand we recommend you check out the live mini-set from the band posted recently on Audiotree Live (shout out Chitown!)….
But how do they do it? Well, first let’s backtrack to clarify that we’re talkin’ about the NYC post-punk musical combo with a post-nasal drip (judging from the photo above!) and not the gothic authoress (we’ll do a writeup on her later!) tho’ granted the band do have a sorta “Prometheus Unbound” energy coming across like a bunch of mad scientists who got on the wrong side of the gods. Most crucially, it’s revealed during the interview portion of the Audiotree session that three of Mary Shelley’s four members went to theater school ahhhh so that’s it which definitely helps explain the group’s self-described “pent-up theater kid vibe”…
…which is foundational to the very existence of the band given that Jackson Dockery (lead vox/guitar/bass) and Sam Pinson (bass/guitar/occasional lead vox) first met at theater school while drummer Charlie Hull is only one step away from being a dramatis personae himself as a filmmaker and professional film editor with Mary Shelley only fully coming into their own with the addition of their third theater school member in the form of Taylor Yancey who plays guitar (also keyboards/backing vox) like she’s ringing a bell (shout out Chuck Berry’s estate!) then throwing it off the top of the bell tower where it was formerly housed and making wind chimes out of the remaining slivers and shards like the bone sculptures made by Leatherface in other words a little jagged and discordant in a compelling if not disturbing way…
…and while obviously there’s no substitute for actually seeing a band live the Audiotree session is a good chance to see and hear Mary Shelley in their natural live-musical-theatrical habitat via multi-camera visuals and professional sound (the session can also be streamed audio only) and even tho’ there’s no audience for them to play off from in Audiotree’s studio MS still manage to make it feel like you the viewer is being directly engaged not to mention directly engaging the camerapersons and the segment’s host and interviewer FINGY who appears equally befuddled and thrilled by Mary Shelley’s outré performance style which makes for the perfect audience surrogate…
…not to mention how Mary Shelley’s songs themselves come across as miniature stage plays full of first-person narratives (granted oft absurdist…we’re talking postmodern theater here kids!) and band members roleplaying as various personas, not to mention trying on different musical genres for size from song-to-song plus performing dressed “in character” whether as escaped mental patients or angry art-school preppies (maybe not so much a costume?!?) which makes MS perfect for this time of year with their costume of choice for their Audiotree session being a band of canine Columbos, i.e., dog masks and beige overcoats of the type favored by private dicks the world over, whose clothes underneath are bloody and torn for some reason…
…which come to think of it is in keeping with their song “Bloodhounds” go figure—a song featured on the Audiotree session and on Mary Shelley’s recent LP of the same name released just this summer—with bloodhounds being a breed of dog so adept at scent-tracking that any of its discoveries on the trail of criminal pursuit are admissible as evidence in a court of law lending its name to a song that likewise roots out the very essence of this band or so we’d venture to speculate with their theatricalized themes and surface playfulness masking an underlying savagery…
…with “Bloodhounds” coming across as a fractured fairy tale about a chance meeting with an attractive “actress in a backless” seated in an adjacent seat on an airplane who invites our narrator to see a “peculiar play” at a mystical theater that appears to function as some sort of portal into the underworld ending up with our narrator running through the deep, dark, dank woods pursued by a brood of bloodhounds after having murdered the entire audience at the play or at least that’s our exegetical takeaway so take it with a grain of salt or a pinch of paprika if you’re watching your salt intake…
…with the progress of the song’s narrative perfectly mirrored in the music itself which after a phantasmagorical fade-in opens onto a coy little melodic motif played over a sultry reggae-fied strut gradually building in intensity as our airborne narrator is seduced and lured to the mysterious theater or the depths of his own subconscious mind with all the wordless high-pitched vocal interjections by Taylor and Sam foreshadowing the troubles that lie ahead not to mention that Phantom of the Opera style organ line…
…with an intensity that continues to build and build (“why did I kill ’em then? / Lalalalalala! / I couldn’t help but be a man”) until finally the bottom drops out (“dogs following me / you know I don’t feel right!) as Jackson understandably shifts to a third-person dissociative perspective as the narrator gets chased into the woods (“He’s bound for the bloodhounds / he’s bound for the bloodhounds!”) with Taylor pivoting to squelching noises on a mini-keyboard as the song culminates in a maelstrom of chaotic sound as the bloodhounds nip at the narrator’s heels…
…so maybe you see what we mean about fun/playful surfaces getting peeled back to reveal a squirming mass of exposed viscera and neurosis underneath which seems to be a semi-consistent thematic in Mary Shelley’s songs which range from satiric to empathetic whether addressing the douchey partygoers of “Bourgeois De Ville” or the annoyed geriatric couple of “The Nursing Home Jig” who trade lines like an octogenarian Meatloaf and Ellen Foley (in reality they’re both septuagenarians now!) in a rare pop song acknowledging the dehumanization of the elderly in a youth-obsessed society on which Jackson comments in one of the Audiotree interview segments and we’ll end with his quote here to give the artistés in question the last word:
That song’s about my grandma and how much she hated the nursing home…and how the older you get the more you get treated like a baby and how your agency gets taken away…we’re big on not just writing from our own perspective but trying different types of people on like people that we hate at parties, or older people…getting inside the head of somebodyh else which is a little bit like acting. And also the way you sing it I think comes out of that. That’s why I’ll sing angry on one song and then slightly less angry on another, like the two modes I have….