An Evening with Sirius Blvck:Indy Emcee Drops Considerable Heat at The Bishop

Sometimes it’s hard for me to get excited about the prospect of seeing rap music performed live. It’s a reluctance I often share with electronic music. I think these genres offer the richest and most exciting sonic possibilities in studio, but I don’t always feel compelled to stand around and watch someone fiddle knobs or perform lyrics over a pre-recorded beat, regardless of how much I like hearing it on record. (“I get it,” I think to myself. “Don’t need to see it live.”) I attribute this to a need for collision and possibility that only a group of live collaborators can provide, but the truth is that I’m not twenty anymore, and the already-short list of things I’m willing to stand around all night watching is becoming slimmer and slimmer by the season.

Still, I felt like I had to see Sirius Blvck at The Bishop last Friday. I’ve spent the last couple weeks digging into the Indianapolis emcee’s excellent LP trilogy, recorded over a 22-month frenzy with producer Bones of Ghosts, and it’s pretty seamless stuff. Maybe I showed up because it was Blvck’s first headlining show in Bloomington, and he sounds so hungry on his latest LP, Light in the Attic, that I had to see what his appetite looked like on stage. The presence of fellow Indy rapper and amateur Internet cooking personality Oreo Jones’ name on the marquee further suggested that this might be a night worth turning out for. Turns out, it was.

Ironically, it was the live bands that left me cold on Friday night. Local openers Nightcap and Birdbath clopped through some unremarkable indie rock, both showing intermittent flashes of potential in between a yawn of half-baked garage jams. (Nightcap’s singer and lead guitarist was the only bright spot here. I found myself wanting to hear her break free of the rhythm section, who seemed more interested in scratching their own itches rather than giving the songs the support and consistency they needed.) By the time Oreo Jones took the stage, I was ready for some vitality. I was ready to see some appetite.

Performing with a live drummer over a pre-loaded auxiliary track, Oreo slipped into his self-assured if somewhat subdued stage persona with a calm confidence that comes from knowing your material backward and forward. He may have only shifted into a couple gears throughout his brief set, but you get the sense that a couple gears is all he really needs. Oreo’s approach here shares a chromosome or two with Queens-based contemporary Heems, whose smoked-out brand of weirdo rap strikes me as a spiritual cousin to the Indy emcee’s laid back, non-sequitorial style. (I don’t mean to suggest that “laid back” is Oreo’s only register. At his best moments, he delivers his rhymes with a percusive snarl, vis-à-vis a young Ghostface Killah.)  Songs like “Needy” and “The John Wayne” were especially sharp on Friday, highlighting Oreo’s knack for control and delivery, and left me anticipating his upcoming album this spring. Oreo Jones’ take on the genre is compelling and fun, and tonight it sounded like the noise of a bright young artist with room to grow.

Sirius Blvck | Photo by Jezy Gray

Sirius Blvck took the stage sometime after midnight. The crowd seemed a little thinner than it did in the front half of the evening, but the excitement was still legible. If there were a few less bodies in the crowd, you couldn’t tell from Blvck’s high-energy performance. Accompanied by DJ  Littletown, Blvck brought his remarkably accomplished studio bangers and slow-burners to life, cycling through some of the best cuts from his recent string of excellent LPs with tremendous poise and charisma. Even songs like “L.A. Confidential”—which, for my money, comes across as a little too by-the-book on record—sounded vivid and urgent as Blvck spat out the hook like a bad taste. He spent the rest of his nearly-flawless set flexing his considerable talent and demonstrating exactly why he’s a deadly serious force to be reckoned with.

Seeing Blvck live, like listening to his records, is something like a hip-hop geography lesson. He chauffeured the crowd down to 90s-era Houston with the smoggy, chopped-up codeine trip of DJ Screw-inspired cuts like “Backwoods” and “Smoke Signals” before being joined onstage by Oreo Jones for Attic-standout, “Tribe Quest,” nodding to a veritable golden age of west coast hip-hop duets. Elsewhere, Blvck’s set recalled Detroit heavyweights like Elzhi and Black Milk and, at some particularly surprising moments, the raw emotive vocal power of the brilliant Atlanta collective, Migos.

Of course, the most significant geographic spot for Blvck is the middle of the map. Indianapolis looms large in his lyrical universe, and I get the sense that it lends him a power that might be softened in a more obvious metropolitan area. I see Sirius Blvck and Oreo Jones as the embodiment of what makes this spot such a rich place for the arts. As Blvck says in “Tribe Quest”:  “Ghost Town Collective, my n---a: Indiana / we comin’ up, yeah we comin’ /  N----s thinkin’ that we f----n’ around / but I swear we bout killed a whole song.” There’s a scrappy unexpectedness to his live show, and his work writ large, which seems to reflect the spirit of the community that produced him. Given his supportive posture throughout the night, enthusiastically watching every act from the crowd, Sirius Blvck strikes me as an artist who invests in that community and enjoys its rewards. Speaking as someone new to Indiana, seeing Blvck do his thing offered valuable insight into what this scrappy little corner of the Midwest is capable of producing—and it’s pretty impressive. When all was said and done at The Bishop on Friday night, I was glad I stood around for this.

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Email: jezy.gray@gmail.com | Twitter: @jezygray