Concert Review: Everest @ Hotel Utah, 10/25

San Francisco’s well-worn Hotel Utah knows how to pull off a good show. The staff is friendly, the stage shares a small, close room with the audience and the acoustics are flattering and well attended to, perfect for the big, rousing power chords that Everest employs to great affect. The five-man group, led by singer and guitarist Russell Pollard, who has played with Sebadoh, the Folk Implosion, and the Watson Twins, is hugely talented and at ease with their craft. When they’re all hitting those chords together they can build a real emotional surge that picks up and carries the listeners with them wherever they might end up.

It was strange than that the net experience was underwhelming. When they weren’t booming out those complex in-tandem harmonies, when the vocals and more understated instrumentals took over, the music kind of dawdled. There were drastic transformations in very short periods of time, in the same song. The quieter passages almost uniformly lacked spontaneity and seemed mostly like time filler — but those passages would end, and suddenly give way to moving rock-out brilliance, as if the band had just been waiting for the good part, and going through the motions till it came along.

This could speak to a tension between their intellectual goals and their immediate emotional reach. Their track “Trees” is a good example, a thoughtful song about relationships and perseverance, whose studio recording begs for repeated listening. Performed live it sounded scripted, the intellectual polish irrelevant. Maybe it was the small-quarters acoustics, but the smooth build that’s so affective in the recording, more or less lurched to the power-chord crescendo while on-stage. One minute it was quiet and nearly ignorable, the next you couldn’t turn away.

Everest is a relatively new band, having made their live debut in 2007 and released their first album, “Ghost Notes” of Vapor Records, just last July, but the members are all veterans of the L.A. indie scene. They obviously know what they’re doing. They play well together, and as such they’ve been recognized and praised by big names like Alan McGee, who named them one of his top bands of 2008, and Neil Young, who they’re touring with and opening for over the next few months. Obviously some people are expecting big things out of them. There are definitely worse bets. They’ve got huge promise and a certain magnetic optimism that’s a breath of fresh air in our current climate of ubiquitous brooding and pessimism.

I just wonder if the members of Everest might be a little ahead of themselves, maybe reaching for an intellectual ideal that, while admirable, is only achievable via honestly felt emotions and music that expresses them. Perhaps that’s a danger of making a band out of many experienced talents, kind of a “too many cooks in the kitchen” situation. But if that’s the only problem than things should be pretty good for Everest. It’s surely a good sign that they’re trying these things at all. They’re a young band yet, even if they don’t sound like it. With a little maturity born of experience they might actually become that which they wish they were already.

Note: Other performers that night included Winter Falls, an unpolished but highly enjoyable Berkeley band, and Le Switch, an L.A. band practically overflowing with personality and dynamism. I recommend them both.