THE MAGIC CARAVAN / ATP IN BROOKLYN: Shellac & Helen Money at Bell House, 9/7/10 and Sleep, Storm of Light & Lichens at Brooklyn Masonic Temple, 9/8/10

(by Christien Lauro)

I’ve never been one for festivals.  I generally find them too expensive and too choked with idiots and bands I don’t like to be worth it.  I’ll admit, the list of performers at the annual upstate NY version of England’s popular All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival has made attendance tempting, but, luckily for me, it is proximal enough that NYC gets the run off of great bands in the weeks surrounding the festival so I can be more selective and see the bands I’m really interested in for a fraction of the price (in money and patience). 

Thus I found myself braving the pinnacle of MTA incompetence, the G train, and traversing the scenic and pungent Gowanus Canal on a Tuesday evening, bound for the quaintly trendy Bell House to see Shellac of North America (or Chicago to be more precise) the long, if rather slow, running project of Steve Albini (Big Black, Rapeman), Todd Trainer (the awesome Brick Layer Cake) and Bob Weston (Volcano Suns, Mission of Burma).  But first up was a fellow Chicagoan, Helen Money (stage alias of cellist, Alison Chesley).  I thought Shellac had lost their minds or begun cultivating a very different sense of humor and gotten some crappy rapper to open for them but I was both relieved and perplexed when a lone woman with a battered cello and lots and lots of guitar pedals graced the stage.  

Allison Chesley

Don’t let the cheesy moniker fool you, Chesley, is a quite talented and entertaining performer and her music could easily be the soundtrack to an offbeat horror film or even a really strange love scene.  She ran her cello through two sizable banks of guitar pedals (fuzz, echo, loop, polyphonic octave generator, you name it, she had it), which she played just as much as her instrument.  She quite impressively still made it sound like a cello, not a big heap of noise (which is more than most musicians who run their instruments through that many pedals can say).  Chesley used her set up to: make atonal loops and play beautiful melodies over them; loop beautiful melodies and then play fuzzed out feedback over them; create some very impressive industrial rhythm loops and play rock god solos over them; scrape C string drones while playing oddly pretty rhythms and melodies.  She picked, bowed and slapped her cello and generally rocked out, all the while winning over a good percentage of the audience who were genuinely sad to see her set end. 

Shellac

But ultimately, everyone was there to see the mighty Shellac play an increasingly rare NYC show.  Shellac’s absurd and sardonic aesthetic is evident before they ever play a note.  Albini and Weston’s precisely symmetrical amplification units flank Trainer’s small drum kit, which sits dead center stage, complete with a Doctor Seuss looking, impossibly tall stand set up behind the drum stool with a lone ride cymbal sitting atop it.  Albini, clad in a blue workmanlike boiler suit, attends to his equipment only to shed the suit, revealing traditional rock musician attire (blue jeans and t-shirt) as Shellac was about to play as if his (literally) blue collar, clock-punch day job were ending and his moonlighting gig as funnyman rock star was about to begin.

The band was in rare form, dissing NYC almost immediately upon finishing opener, “Copper”.  Albini and Weston traded anti-NY quips in between songs and, as per usual, opened up the floor for audience Q&A sessions (which, while occasionally accidentally informative, are usually more a showcase for Weston’s quick wit) while they tuned.  They ribbed each other, took endless pot-shots at NYC, performed acrobatic stage maneuvers (especially the rather frail looking Trainer who at various points windmilled his arms around Pete Townshend style, played the tall cymbal behind his back, ran around the stage beating a hand held snare drum, even while resting it on his head, during the band’s epic rendition of “End of Radio”, and generally sweated out his body weight, all the while playing impossibly hard – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a drummer so skinny play so hard, it’s kind of frightening to watch, I always imagine his bones are going to be atomized at any moment), and even found the time to play a decent selection of career-spanning tracks.  Shellac’s signature jittery minimalism rarely sounded so tight or urgent.  They really played the crap out of crowd favorites such as, “Wing Walker”, “Canada” (which focused the band’s sarcastic humor away from NYC momentarily to mock our neighbors to the north) and “Squirrel Song” (which opened with Albini screaming, “This is a sad fucking song!  We’ll be lucky if I don’t bust out crying!”).

Albini's arch humor was on display in many of his lyrics, some personal favorites being the anti-chorus of “Prayer To God” where the protagonist wheedles the aforementioned deity to kill his ex-lover’s current flame in any number of horribly slow and painful ways, finally pleading in an unending mantra/prayer, “just fucking kill him, fucking kill him, kill him already, kill him, kill him already, kill him already, kill him, AMEN!” and the exhortations of “Be Prepared” – “ I was born already bald, BE PREPARED!  I was born wearing pants, BE PREPARED!  I was born with $20 in my pocket, BE PREPARED!”  Albini’s ad-libbing skills were apparent during his extensive lyrical extrapolations of “Wing Walker” (the tale of an obsessed man who gives up his entire life to realize his dream of building and flying an airplane) and, particularly, “End of Radio” as he plays the part of a radio DJ ending his final broadcast by commenting on the history of radio and human folly to an audience of theoretical aliens who may intercept the transmission in ten thousand years and wonder what it is they are hearing.  Judging by the sold out crowd’s joyous reaction, they knew exactly what they were hearing at the Bell House that night but after a solid hour and a half of well executed humor and fury, the band cranked out rollicking set closer, “The Crow” and sent many happy hipsters out into the Brooklyn night. 

The following evening (perhaps auspiciously, the night of the new moon), I braved the cock-blocking G train once again to get to ‘NYC’s loudest venue’, the sweltering Brooklyn Masonic Temple, to see the holy grail of stoner doom purveyors, Sleep.  

Sleep

The newly reformed trio of original members Al Cisneros (OM) and Matt Pike (High On Fire) and new addition, Jason Roeder (Neurosis) was playing their second show of the week at the temple.  First on the bill was excellent local band, Storm of Light.  Led by visual artist/lead guitarist and vocalist, Scott Graham (Neurosis, Red Sparowes, Battle of Mice, etc.), SOL use intricate and evocative backing films to augment their simultaneously pretty and heavy, gloomy mini-epics.  The effect of the images and sound is truly stunning and worked perfectly in the psychically potent and image laden Masonic temple.  Another Brooklyn local, Robert Lowe (90 Day Men, OM), performing under his solo moniker, Lichens, was up next…sort of.  Lowe set up quite rapidly and seemed ready to go within a few minutes but was plagued by crippling equipment problems that prevented him from playing for more than half of his allotted hour.  He finally just plugged his microphone into some looping pedals and used them in conjunction with his impressive vocal range to create a short but effective piece of creepily soothing drone apocalypse.

And then, the moment the fire code defying, (over) capacity crowd had been waiting for…Tony Iommi’s greatest hits.  No really, the large onstage screen showed an action shot of Iommi, circa the 1970’s rocking his signature SG, foot up on the monitor, wearing some horrible white one-piece bit of fashion faux pas, while a weird mash-up of old Sabbath riffs, solos, drum fills, etc. blasted out of the speakers and some dry iced smoke crept along the stage floor, all to the crowd’s vociferous delight.  (Note: the tour shirt they were selling at the merch table bore a photo of Iommi similar to the one projected on the screen with the legend “The Deity” on the front and on the back had stats as if he were a Dungeons & Dragons avatar [the best being ‘SPECIAL ATTACKS: Vorpal SG’] and below that the only place that Sleep’s name actually appeared on their own shirt “Sleep: Marijuananaut’s Return US Tour A.D. 2010”)  Just in case you missed it – Sleep worship Black Sabbath and Iommi in particular and more specifically, the riff.  The riff that was so fucking heavy it created an entire metal industry.  The riff that was so good they played it for over an hour, sang lyrics over it like, “Drop out of life with bong in hand, follow the smoke to the riff filled land, proceed the Weedian, Nazareth”, called it Dopesmoker, lost their record contract and broke up more than a decade ago.  But the riff never really dies; like a crusty slasher in a shitty B-movie, it repeatedly rises from the grave, unrepentant and hungry for new souls…and cash (just look at Ozzfest).

The loud and sweaty crowd was getting increasingly agitated, so, it was a great relief when Pike finally stepped out on the stage, shirtless and already sweaty, strapped on his Les Paul, held it up like weapon and smashed the riff that opens “Jerusalem (Dopesmoker)” out of his two full Orange stacks.  The sound was so loud that I could feel the skin on my face actually tighten and move back.  The heavily tattooed Pike looked like an impishly grinning devil risen up to damn all those within earshot of his massive wall of THC fuzzed guitar tone as he gleefully sustained the living hell out of the riff.  The screen behind him played imagery about as subtle as the deafening sound – various scenes of rockets launching and floating, dreamy outer spacescapes, stars, planets, etc. with footage of fields of marijuana plants fluttering in a gentle breeze superimposed on top.  A few minutes later when, the more stoic Cisneros thumbed his Rickenbacker to life, the rumble coming from his full Orange stack and two huge Sunn amps vibrated my clothes like thousands of ants were crawling on the fabric.  The sound was literally so thick if felt like a physical barrier against my skin.  By the time Roeder finally began bashing the skins seven minutes in, the entire audience was already slowly lurching their sweaty torsos and banging their heads in time to the riff, entranced along with the band.  Somewhere around the ten-minute mark, “Jerusalem” smoothly morphed into a super fuzzy rendition of “Holy Mountain”.  Around fifteen minutes in Cisneros finally graced the audience with some vocals.  He returned to the gravelly delivery style from the Sleep albums, eschewing the more restrained incantatory vocals from his OM oeuvre.  This opening laid a solid twenty minutes of uninterrupted riffage on the crowd, who, of course, screamed for more and after the briefest pause, the band launched into the endlessly entertaining, “Dragonaut”, as an animated dragon flew around apocalypse red skies on the screen.  The show continued on in the same vein for over two hours, during which time the band ploughed through all of seminal stoner doom bible, Sleep’s Holy Mountain, interwoven with various excerpts of “Jerusalem”.  The images on the screen remained subtle as ever, with hypnotic undersea footage for “Aquarian”, images of Stonehenge for “The Druid”, etc., you get the picture.  To prove that the band did understand and employ a certain degree of subtlety, they played a quite pretty and mellow extended intro for the true highlight of the show, “From Beyond”, that was so quiet it couldn’t be heard over the drunken mumblings of the half deaf audience.  The band huddled together, facing each other and played the song, for and to themselves, completely ignoring the noise of the crowd.  When they eventually blasted into the immense slab of stoned sonic bliss that was the bulk of the song, they pulled out all the stops – dime-stop dynamics, super trippy vocal effects, shredding guitar solos, more floating pot leaves and volume swells that, even after an hour plus of the most heinous sonic abuse imaginable, still managed to split skulls and burst ear drums.  By the time the song bled into Pike’s ripping solo from “Jerusalem” and Cisneros began his road paving chant, “Proceeds the Weedian…Nazareth!” just before the band exited the stage, I felt like I was going to collapse under the colossal weight of the riff and the heat trapped in the room.  They returned after a brief rest to perform some really kick ass new (or perhaps just unreleased?) material and a completely beside the point Ozzy Osbourne cover.  No one could claim they didn’t get their money’s worth out of Sleep that night.  My head was so fuzzy by the time I reached the craptastic G train, I could have floated home.

-Christien Lauro