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Nothing Max Clarke tried would help make his Wednesday night set at Mississippi Studios with his band Cut Worms achieve absolute perfection. His guitar kept slipping out of tune and little hiccups in the presentation of each song weren’t easily elided by the rest of the group, who played with a studied calm and quiet concentration.
Then there was the issue of the couple standing at the foot of the stage who decided that was the right time and place to hold a loud conversation. Clarke gently asked them, if they wanted to keep talking, to take it to the back of the room or next door to Bar Bar. “I have a hard enough time trying to remember the words to my songs,” he said.
To their credit, the couple stayed quiet for the rest of the evening. But even without that distraction, Cut Worms never truly reached cruising altitude. The little slip-ups and sour notes didn’t seem to be the culprits, but rather the sleepy country-pop vibe that Clarke cultivated on his most recent album, titled simply Cut Worms. He hewed far too close to the arrangements and tone of those recordings, rather than amplifying them or juicing them up for the live experience.
The vibe of the night was, in that way, a perfect reflection of the quick change in our local weather patterns that inspired many attendees in the sold-out crowd to break out their cardigans and hoodies for the evening. With the combined body heat of the audience and the welcome gush of the warmth coming out of the venue’s heating vents, the evening turned more and more soporific as it rolled on. That’s hardly the fault of Clarke and his fine, road-tight band, but in the days since, I’ve had to fight the feeling that it was all a pleasant, drowsy dream rather than a typical night out.