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| Zseni went to see the Black Angels/Lansing-Dreiden show last night. by Zsenicorpse 06/21/2006, 5:50pm PDT | ||||
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| The Black Angels:
Album: Passover (80% perfect) Show: Like the album, the Black Angel's show was sonically flawless. They have a huge hard-on for the Velvet Underground, but that girl they have on drums would fucking bury Maureen Tucker, and the whole Black Angels sound is more like Bauhaus after a tour of duty in Vietnam than anything VU. They were full of glorious dark energy and white rage. The guys I was with did not dig the sound. Too monotonous! Yeah maybe, to untuned post-indie-rock ears. I guess you need to know your history to get their deal. I could see not getting the monstrous and impenetrable wall of sound if you didn't already know and love VU and Joy Division. Joy Division especially. Every song they started with those huge huge drums I thought would turn out to be a Joy Division cover. The singer was hot in an LV way. But I was way into watching the drummer and the rhythm guitarist, whose frighteningly fast hands produced thick washes of noise. They were intense. There's an informal competition among many hip indie rock bands to see who can sound the most like Joy Division, but way too many are attempting the Joy Division of Warsaw, or Leaders Of Men, and not enough the Joy Division of Dead Souls or Autosuggestion. So the Black Angels are good at picking up that slack in the competition, just like Lansing-Dreiden is good at picking up the Love Will Tear Us Apart/Transmission angle. By the way, I could never get into Interpol. Lansing-Dreiden Album: The Dividing Island (74% perfect) Show: This show sucked so hard I left 5 songs into it. I left as a defensive measure, so I wouldn't have to hear those horrible fucking Jamaicans murder my favorite song in the world: The Advancing Flags. Even though these guys were the top-billed act, the club cleared out after the Black Angels left. Those were the smart people. I hope that L-D aren't studio wanks. I spotted the actual Lansing-Dreiden central figures, who were NOT the dreadlocked clowns messing up the vocals like a couple of sixth graders in a talent show, and who were in fact working overtime to make up for suddenly awful sound and surprisingly bad singers. I was really mad about those guys. I was just furious. The Doug Fir wears a sparse crowd well - it's an amazing venue - but people kept peeling out as the shittiness of the vocalists bubbled out into the room like so much pee stain. And so did I. The first L-D album, The Incomplete Triangle, rocked my brain so hugely that I didn't listen to anything else for three or four months. But the actual L-D band, coming on stage after a very hasty setup, and following up a band with such a giant giant sound - they just sounded thin and phoned-in. The keyboard dork was kind of awesome, like a white Ryuichi Sakamoto, moving between synth, sequencer, and guitar super-easy and super-brilliant, but that was all there was to watch in that poisoned well. That's kind of a studio wank thing, isn't it? Kind of a Kate-Bush-y thing? A dead live show? Didn't they know that out in the crowd was someone who could have salvaged their whole live deal like sko rebirth of Grace Slick? |
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Zseni went to see the Black Angels/Lansing-Dreiden show last night. by 06/21/2006, 5:50pm PDT  That warrants a third person reference. NT by 06/21/2006, 7:04pm PDT Re: That warrants a third person reference. by 06/22/2006, 8:24am PDT This isn't quite what I meant. NT by 06/21/2006, 7:49pm PDT |
