Never a band to do things the easy way, Baltimore’s Lake Trout has amassed a list of reliable towns and venues that would make just about any road manager wince with confusion and boredom. Most bands whose ten-year anniversary was looming (and gaining) in the rearview while they creep steadily toward success would make sure to concentrate on large, metropolitan areas of the Northeast and Midwest, but coming as they do from a somewhat forgotten town themselves, Lake Trout has established historic and emotional ties with many of the overlooked and underappreciated towns that others wouldn’t touch with a luxury-appointed mansion on wheels. Their annual December jaunt through the tidewaters of North Carolina and Virginia has become somewhat of a holiday tradition, as old school fans dust off their memories and let the young’uns coach them through the changes that always come so quickly for the quintet.
Unbeknownst to those who see it only under the hot summer sun, North Carolina’s Outer Banks has a tranquil yet active vibrancy even in the winter, and the locals were out for Lake Trout’s Friday night performance at the Outer Banks Brewing Station. Sleeper, the opening act for the evening, missed their absent frontman, as their song skeletons rang hollow, and Lake Trout was forced to shake the crowd out of their jam-induced slumber. The vocals of “Riddle,” a new song to appear on one of two releases coming in the spring, pushed the audience forward while Mike Lowry and James Griffith’s rhythm section pulled them back in and eventually won the tug of war before fading into Ed Harris’s hypnotic guitar on “Say Something.”
Finally shaking off the spell, the band plowed through an as-yet untitled new edition, showing that their nearly ten year struggle hasn’t been in vain. The band plays with a confidence befitting their experience, and they work the audience’s nerves with the skill of a classical composer, slipping unexpected beats beneath comfortable melody, and holding the stabbing paradox just long enough to break the skin. They don’t release, they relent, and by the end, Matt Pierce’s distorted screams are more comforting than the silence.
Throwing more fresh meat to the wolves, the band presented another untitled cut (temporarily “Boots”) whose big, arena-rock sound and tricky, under-inflated-ball bounce eventually slid into the familiar regret of “I Was Wrong.” They next took a rare opportunity to explore the narrow, shadowy chasms between the epileptic beats of “Let Me Show You What I’m Used To” before kicking and screaming into Ministry’s “Stigmata.” “Holding” provided the quiet shower after the storm, and Harris and Woody Ranere served up a little more tension and relent on “Bliss” and “#2.” Closing the night with a brutal trio of “Stutter,” the newer “Pill,” and the relentless wall-of-sound assault of “Bully,” Lake Trout left the crowd deaf and dumb and shaking, stumbling into the warm, salty December night.
