Long Version

There was a time when skillful guitar playing was an ends to fame, fortune, and everything that goes with it: headlining dates in the largest arenas made by man, paeans outlining, in great detail, one’s singular genius by a robust and subservient music press, and the knowledge that, at any given moment, denim-clad youths across the nation were listening to your music. In the the factory breakroom, at the post-work bar, in the coed-dorms, blasting out of car stereos across the newly-constructed highway system, it was a virtuosic guitar playing.

But as factories shuddered across this nation, as the middle-class hollowed out, as the nature of work transitioned from production of goods to the vaporous programming of software, and the accompanying serfdom of the “gig-worker,” not just guitar, but virtuosity more generally was cast aside, the abilities of human individuals to elicit emotion from other humans, with merely with a caress of a hand against a steel string, spurned, for the stultifying sounds of machinery making modern music. 

Enter Slender Gems, a Portland quartet. Equally influenced by the big, opened-tuned chords of 90s slacker-rock and the elegant shredding of 70s AOR, by rights they should be playing out of Marshall stacks to the beer swilling legions. But the righteous end of virtuosity is something more ancient and sacred than the postwar excesses of the United States: it is the ability to stir something in the human soul, to gesture at something great and ineluctable in our shared consciousness, and salute it. The confluence of LeVeque’s acerbic wit, the might of the rhythm section, and white-hot, dueling/twin guitar leads will delight all those who think and feel... and perhaps stir something long dormant in their beleaguered hearts.

short Version

Formed in 2018 by longtime DIY musician Jordan LeVeque, whose punk rock bonafides include a stint as  the final resident/booker of North Portland standby Fail House, Slender Gems are a murderer’s row of some of the city’s finest musical talents. Equally influenced by the big, opened-tuned chords of 90s slacker-rock and the elegant shredding of 70s AOR, they are at once grandiose and intimate, with LeVeque’s acerbic observations of our spiritually bankrupt world, a resounding clarion call over their guitar pyrotechnics.