The Long Winters indulge demanding crowd at Seattle homecoming

Concert review |

In a moment, the band fell back, stage lights turned outward over the audience, and a full floor of bouncing bodies screamed the lyrics, mimicking singer John Roderick's plaintive vocal take and adding its own desperate joy.

"Start...please, start. Please start!"

After depriving its hometown of concerts for roughly a year, Seattle indie-rock band The Long Winters chose a big venue for its Saturday, July 5th comeback, filled it, and was received with unmitigated love. Fans at the downtown Showbox at the Market shouted song requests all night and sang along to almost every lyric.

TLW is set to hit the studio soon and record a new album. Beyond getting the band back into fighting shape, Saturday's concert should have given it confidence that people want it sooner than later.

The upbeat, strummy fan-favorite "Cinnamon" is about a girl, and the specific "Please start!" lyric is about a car, but the crowd wasn't pleading to Roderick & company- Eric Corson (bass); Nabil Ayers (drums); Jonathan Rothman (guitar, keys). It was demanding, "Don't stop!"

And they didn't for another hour, at least.

The Showbox was not uncomfortably crowded, but well-populated with people in their 20s and 30s from the stage all the way to the bars in the back corners of the club, both of which were open for the 21 and over event and neither of which had any vacant seating.

Since TLW debuted in 2002, John Roderick has grown into a complete star.

Because he's in a Seattle band and on independent Seattle label Barsuk Records, he's a local figure as a man of music. To TLW, he contributes megawatt stage personality, catchy, deceptively simple songwriting, and a distinctive singing style: foiling a heathery, jubilant tenor against a rich baritone. But he's also a man of letters, known as a familiar supporter of the Greenwood neighborhood's nonprofit writing center, 826 Seattle, and for his own writing as a regular music columnist for Seattle Weekly. To some, he's a figurehead for a particularly literary sect of NW indie-rock.

Certainly his head is a figure in itself. Roderick's cartoon bust adorns each Weekly column — but it was more memorable on stage. Wearing novelist-style brown framed glasses, his head was a festival of hair. Everyone in TLW makes some face-hair effort, but Roderick's beard is the bushiest. It mixed with his shoulder length hair, which whipped around when he did faux Eddie Van Halen finger-tapping on his electric guitar and then stayed in place when, at the end of the concert, he fashioned it into two sweaty pigtails.

He looked funny and friendly, and that's what he was, easily joking with a crowd that loved him and sort of looked like him: "What, is Ballard closed? There's so many beards in here!"

Opening local bands BOAT and The Cops played opposite sets. BOAT looked like what they were — young, cool elementary school teachers — and played cutesy rock that sounded like '90s slack-rock band Pavement. The Cops aspired only to rock, and did it deliberately and with bludgeon force. Still, they somehow managedg to make three guitars sound minimalist. Singer Michael Jaworski said he was previously in the Peace Corps with Roderick, and both bands seemed happy to support TLW for such a big concert.

Andrew Matson: 206-464-2153 or amatson@seattletimes.com