It’s easy to forget that rock and roll is very often ridiculous. Or, rather, perhaps optimally, that it succeeds best when it achieves the right balance between the silly and the serious, yielding something, as a result, quite close to the sublime. To the naked eye, Chicago boys Baby Teeth more than live up to the Eleanor Friedberger bon mot about their aural resemblance to Queen that’s been following them around online like a particularly obedient schnauzer. That is to say — they’re rightly celebrated for their serious chops, seriously good songs, and for being a seriously fun band. But, on stage at Schubas for the second night of 2008’s Tomorrow Never Knows festival, it’s immediately apparent that this band is not one to shy away from a particularly lusty embrace of the silly.

After the completion of their sound check, just before kicking in to one of The Simp‘s biggest bangers, “Swim Team,” inimitable frontman Abraham Levitan sets the tone with the faux-gracious bit of banter, “Thank you, that was our first song, called ‘Breaking Down the Fourth Wall.’” The same statement coming from, say, Dan Bejar in the context of a Destroyer show would likely be hailed as a brilliant example of meta-commentary on the act of performing an indie rock concert, but here, no less brilliantly, it was mostly a humbly goofy acknowledgment that doing a soundcheck in front of a packed room is just kind of weird and awkward while also gesturing toward one of the band’s most notable charms — the place where its baldly outsized sonic ambition intersects with its currently circumstantially limited means and audiences. They’re unfurling stadium-sized hooks and self-consciously show-bizzy glamour that would have fit right in to the Johnny Carson era of “The Tonight Show” to a crowd of mere dozens, and the disconnect, far from being delusional or ironically nihilistic about an unrecoverable heyday of entertainment fit for a monoculture, is gleefully intoxicating. Talking shit about life’s most important subjects, then turning around to rigorously analyze the fluffiest of trifles with a poker-face — this is the hallmark of some of the most effective comedy, and Baby Teeth is well on its way to doing the same musically.

In addition to “Swim Team,” they shook the foundation of the place with other older favorites like “Snake Eyes,” “The Rules,” and “The Simp” and also took the opportunity to debut a few new songs that will appear on their next album. “Hustle Beach” stands out in particular for its bass line, which grooved so hard and hung in the air so fat, it sounded, gloriously, like Jim Cooper put the entirety of Thriller‘s low end into a blender and served it back out to us with a side of gravy.

The brilliance of the band’s patchwork combination of unpretentious intelligence, canny genre-play, shit-hot energy, and total devotion to the music is inextricably connected to the inherent ephemerality of its silliness. The one-liners and funny faces and bizarre improvisations that struck any of us audience members, or the band itself, as hilarious on this particular night in January may never achieve the same result next year, or even at the next show. Truth, to say nothing or humor, is like that. Which makes Baby Teeth’s commitment to tickling our funny bones in the same beat that they’re appealing to the movement of our hips all the more — dare I say — poetic. Being in a rock band may be the most ridiculous of fools’ errands, but they also know that there are few better uses for beautiful, vital, fleeting youth than to burn it as thoroughly as possible in the service of never-to-be-recaptured delight. It’s “ya had to be there” as benediction.

Ann Arbor’s afro-beat collective Nomo comes ready to stun. Like some kind of amoeba of funk, their edges seem to wobble and blur as they rev themselves up into an ecstasy of musical locomotion. Opening with the ferocious “Nu Tones” and never slackening the pace from there, the seven-piece made it clear they’re in no way going to allow themselves to be relegated to the token “world music” or “jazz-influenced” slot in any given festival setting where they’re likely to actually be the token world music or jazz-influenced act on the bill. They came to conquer with as much passion and energy and raw feel-good power as any of the more stereotypically configured guitar-bass-and-drum outfits full of dudes with greasy hair and sketchy beards and beat-up jeans slung low on their scrawny hips. Which is not to say that Nomo is in any way compromising their musical approach in a bid for wider popularity. No, they come not to bury instrumental jazz-funk but to breathe new life into it and reintroduce its uniquely visceral pleasures to crowds of kids perhaps predisposed to turn their noses up at anything that carries a whiff of jam.

For one thing, it seems they have a finely honed aversion to self-indulgence. The rabid, howling baritone sax solos propel the intensity of the tune rather than stagnating as energetically flaccid bathroom breaks for the crowd’s collective attention span; unless I blinked and missed it, there was nary a drum solo or other rhythmic breakdown in sight; and the songs were never allowed to outstay their welcome, uniformly clocking in well under the eight or nine minute mark. Their setlist hewed closely to the contents of New Tones (“Fourth Ward,” “Divisions,” and “We Do We Go” standing out most especially, though unfortunately sans their casually sexy cover of Joanna Newsom’s “Book of Right On”), both a reward to previously indoctrinated fans as well as an implicit invitation to new ones to explore and befriend these songs in all their multifaceted glory.

The choice to close their set out with one last song played off the stage and in the crowd — a trick familiar, of course, to John Vanderslice, Arcade Fire, and Dan Deacon fans — was a final blatant but not insincere bid to prove how entirely possible it is to rock with horns and mbiras and all manner of handheld percussion. Hey, if you can’t lead an indie rock crowd to jazz, bring the jazz to the indie rock crowd. And then melt their faces off once you’re there.

Baby Teeth Daytrotter Session
Baby Teeth Official Site
Lujo Records
Nomo Official Session