Empty Country, Charles Bissel, and Field Mouse at Knitting Factory (05-06-2022)

Jun 6

Jun 6 Empty Country, Charles Bissel, and Field Mouse at Knitting Factory (05-06-2022)

Tom and I saw NYC four-piece Cymbals Eat Guitars play Bowery Ballroom during the foggy, liminal week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in 2017. The Wrens’ Charles Bissell, Cymbals’ frontman and songwriter Joseph D’Agostino’s guitar teacher and mentor, opened for them, and after a typically fantastic Cymbals set, Bissell came out and fronted the band for a few tracks from The Wrens’ 2003 masterpiece The Meadlowlands. The Wrens were at least nominally still a band at that point, but they hadn’t played out in years. For a lot of people including myself to whom The Meadlowlands meant everything but had never had the chance to see any of the tracks off of it played live, it was a magical moment.

A lot has changed for both of these bands since then. We didn’t know it at the time – no one except the guys on stage did - but what we were witnessing was the final Cymbals Eat Guitars show, ending a ten-year run of some of the best music coming out of NYC or anywhere else. It’s debatable whether the Wrens still existed in any meaningful sense in 2017, but they definitely don’t now. After nearly twenty years of wait for a promised new album from the band, with teases here and there and clockwork refrains of “This is the year!”, the Wrens pulled the ultimate Wrens move and broke up (if a band that hasn’t really done anything in a decade-plus qualifies to do that) in acrimony without releasing anything (read that whole story over at Stereogum here).

Almost immediately after dissolving Cymbals, D’Agostino formed Empty Country with his wife Rachael Browne of Philadelphia dream-rock group Field Mouse and a cast of other musicians. Empty Country’s wonderful self-titled debut album came out in March 2020, with a release show with Field Mouse and Bissell opening set for April 24 of that year. Yeah. The show was obviously canceled (you know why).

Now well over two years later, that show finally happened with its originally scheduled lineup on a rainy night last month at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory. After Field Mouse opened with an energetic set that belied the band’s name, Bissell came out with his guitar and pedal board. Bissell was alone onstage for his set, but he made great use of his looping pedals to build glassy guitar textures and percussion patterns to play and sing over. His strums at times felt as improvisationally rhythmic as drum fills, and the effect was enhanced by the egg shaker he was holding in his right hand as he played. Bissell’s breathy voice is immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent any time with The Wrens’ music, and it was a beautiful fit for a cover of Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” He was also quite chatty with the audience: “I’ve leapfrogged putting out music,” he joked after a medley of song fragments from what was going to be The Wrens’ next album.

After Bissell left the stage (with no songs from The Meadowlands played!) Empty Country finally had the chance to perform the songs from their debut in front of a hometown crowd. The country may be empty, but the Knitting Factory’s small stage was quite full: stage right was basically the Cymbals Eat Guitars setup, with the complementary guitarist/backup vocalist from at least one iteration of Cymbals also backing D’Agostino here (I’m pretty sure). On stage left, a pedal steel player was joined by Browne and the keyboardist from Field Mouse, both holding moleskine notebooks like hymnals despite not really seeming to need any help with the lyrics.

Empty Country is a sparser album than anything D’Agostino did with Cymbals, but it also has a warmth that is unequaled in his previous band’s catalog; this came through even as the large ensemble onstage added energy and body to the songs. Empty Country opened with “Marian,” a gorgeous journey of a track that tells the story of the birth of a miner’s daughter that, in the context of the rest of the album might also represent D’Agostino’s child? From there the band played most of their debut album with a couple of new tracks that made me very excited to see what the band will do next sprinkled in. Empty Country closed their set by ripping through “Warning,” a real shitkicker of a Cymbals Eat Guitars cover off 2014’s LOSE.

As everyone in the audience was surely hoping, the band brought Bissell back out for the encore, and together they roared out a chills-inducing cover of “Everyone Choose Sides,” the centerpiece track from The Meadowlands. We can’t wait to see what EmptyCountry does next, and even as Bissell declared this set his “last show of the Wrens era," there’s some hope on that front too: Bissell will be continuing on in an as-yet unnamed project, and the rest of the band is splitting off as Aeon Flux. Maybe we’ll finally get to hear some of those new songs.