Concert Review: Saintseneca Build A Pillar of Na At Bowery Ballroom

I saw Saintseneca a few years at Webster Hall, and it was like watching someone build a church. Every lyric and hook was the mortar and cement needed to build a chapel for the lost. At Bowery Ballroom, what made Saintseneca so attractive, as a group, is that they have solidifies their music to feel like a religion for the outcasts. 

Maybe, it really is the name? Saintseneca! The minute you hear it, you expect to get a little card with a prayer, and to see a glossed picture of a poor, mournful beggar holding a lamb. (P.S. I was raised Christian.) Thus, with a lit heart behind them, the idea of loneliness and the surmount of memories that creep in when we are alone surged as a theme. Celebrating Pillar of Na, their new album, Saintseneca provided a sacred night rather than a concert. In it, we were all led to be pensive and prodigious by remembering how we remember. Lyrically, they were analyzing how we embrace the moments in our life that, so print upon our souls, our minds can’t forget them, and our hearts become molded according to them. It is a very Westworld idea; memory as the key making a human being. Yet, all that magic and mystique would no be possible without Zac  Little.

Little’s voice sounds like its weeping, and I love it. There is an inherent sullen and saintliness to his vocality that makes tracks like “Beast in the Garden” or “Ladder to the Sun” feel like recitation of Biblical tales or calls from Job for mercy. He understands that his voice is a narrator; meant to add zest to Saintseneca’s transforming, epic tales of rhythm. From Noah’s Arc to Garden of Eden, Pillar of Na provides tracks that provide orphic settings through surrealistic rock. Hence, their show, though engaging, feels intimate and insular.

Saintseneca feels kind of shy, which makes the group enigmatically dynamic. Sure, Little may give the typical “Thanks for coming!” all bands feel impulsed to say, but I like his shy, distant nature because it does build the mythos of Saintseneca. They balance an aura of purlieu affability that, again, makes their show feel like you have been handed a holy relic; it may not be Heaven itself, but its art is a reminder that such a place exists. For More Information On Saintseneca Click Here.