by Christien Lauro
I always feel out of place at Radio City Music Hall. Whenever I’m inside gawking at the opulent art deco interior, I think that any moment a large usher is going to tell me I have to leave because I’m not wearing a tie. But I dutifully showed up, along with several thousand other fans to see Jason Pierce lead his band Spiritualized plus an orchestra and choir in a performance of his classic Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space LP last Friday night at said venerable venue. If there is any modern album that actually deserves to be performed in its entirety at Radio City Music Hall with a string octet, a horn sextet, a white-gowned gospel choir, and a percussionist augmenting a six-piece rock band, it is definitely Ladies and Gentlemen…
After a late start, a mirror ball mishap and Kate Radley’s sampled voice introducing the album’s opening title track, the curtain finally rose over a stage crowded with musicians and equipment and a dazzling light show which included a backdrop made to look like the stars in deep space and harsh LED strobe lights (and let’s not forget the requisite dry iced smoke). It was impossible not to be awed by the visual spectacle but that was nothing compared to the dense layers of sound created by the dozens of musicians. Not content to simply play the album, Pierce rearranged most of the songs and utilized all the available musicians to maximum effect. For anyone familiar with the original album there were some unique surprises (a harmonica vs. gospel choir dueling solo during “No God Only Religion” being one stand out), some amazing arrangements (the choir overtaking the rest of the musicians on “Home of the Brave”), some especially captivating performances (“I Think I’m In Love”, “Broken Heart”, “Cool Waves”) and a great many moments where musicians and audience were blasted en masse into the furthest reaches of outer space (all the Varèse meets “Sister Ray” instrumental jams on “The Individual”, “No God…” and “Cop Shoot Cop”).
At times the effect of the very loud instrumental rumble coupled with the seizure-inducing LED strobe lights was nauseating – particularly when someone in the audience decided to blaze a joint during “The Individual”. But an album so steeped in heartbreak, drug addiction and ultimately the healing powers of rock and roll is bound to be a bit messy for performer and audience alike. There were certainly moments of blissful transcendence as well (the horn and choir breakdown on “Come Together”, the buildup of “Stay With Me”, the languid opening of “I Think I’m In Love”). After nearly an hour and a half of pummeling the audiences’ eyes and ears, the band received a well-deserved standing ovation at the end of the absolutely epic cacophony of album closer, “Cop Shoot Cop” and quickly returned to the stage for a brief encore.
They opened the encore with an amazing arrangement of “Out of Sight” from the 2001 LP, Let It Come Down. This became a unexpected highlight of the show as the band really blasted into the stratosphere with horns blazing, string players sawing away, guitarists rocking out with tremolos raging, wailing harmonica and full on choir back up for Pierce’s unusually impassioned vocals (coupled with the extraterrestrial lighting effects) all working together to add a lush and powerful explosion of sound and emotion to the originally more spare composition. And just when you thought they couldn’t top all that had gone before, they perfectly ended the evening with a gorgeous, Velvet Underground goes to church rendition of the Edwin Hawkins Singers staple “Oh Happy Day” (hey why let a perfectly good white-gowned gospel choir go to waste?).
The musicians received another standing ovation and as the house lights came up bringing everyone back down to Earth, I left feeling exhausted and exhilarated (as well as half deaf and blind), knowing I had just seen one hell of a show, in every sense of the word. Really that should’ve been enough to keep me going for quite a while but the following afternoon I made my way to Damrosch Park in Lincoln Center just as the MC was announcing the start of the second half of the Ponderosa Stomp: The Detroit Breakdown show. I found a seat as Death began their set of dirty rock smack downs. While the influence of bands like The Stooges and the MC5 was obvious, their music sounded more avant than proto punk.
As they performed “Politicians In My Eyes”, it occurred to me that the song could have easily been written yesterday rather than 35 years ago and it’s about the fear of being drafted for the Vietnam war! I couldn’t help thinking that if you sped them up a bit you’d have a more soulful Dead Kennedys or perhaps a less dubby Bad Brains and while I could see why they didn’t quite catch on back then it is sad to think it took over thirty years for them to get a measure of respect and recognition. Luckily Drag City has begun the process of saving them from obscurity by giving their old recordings wide release. I was impressed with their songs and their playing but many of the elderly people and weekending tourists in attendance seemed confused, dismayed and perhaps a little offended. I guess that is what you get when you schedule a band called Death to play outside in the middle of Lincoln Center at 5:00 pm on a Saturday!
Next up was newly reformed, The Gories, with their patented brand of fuzzy minimalist mayhem. They put up a brave front of thoroughly enjoying themselves given the acrimony that surrounded their dissolution and still seems to hang about them. But really, it would be very hard to deny the unmitigated pleasure of listening to their exuberantly primitive caterwauling. They definitely know how to put on an energetic show too as evidenced by Mick Collins jumping up and down on his amp until both he and the amp spilled over onto the stage. While they might not be particularly polished musicians (and really that is being kind) they are a lot of fun and seem to inspire an almost adolescent joy in their fans, many of whom jumped and danced around the park for their entire set (much to the dour disproval of the old folks who left in droves during their performance).
This enthusiasm could become a bit misguided as in the case of one overzealous fan that brought along his own tambourine and attempted to play along with Peg O’Neill’s barely competent drum beats. This created a rather annoying arrhythmic echo effect that was impossible to ignore and grew more pronounced as the set went on. Despite that, watching The Gories was a total blast; I especially enjoyed their interesting take on Suicide’s “Ghost Rider”! Following them was ? and the Mysterians and I truly wanted to see them play their signature hit “96 Tears” but I had to rush home to feed and walk the dog and then head into the heart of chooch darkness (the lower east side on a Saturday night) to see the triumphant return of Arab on Radar after an almost decade long hiatus.
I waded through pustulant wanker choked Ludlow Street to the Cake Shop and entered the dank, hot basement club just after Oakland, CA septet, No Babies, took the stage…and the floor. It’s a safe bet that even if the puny stage at Cake Shop was big enough to hold all the members of the band and their equipment, it could never have contained their manic performance. Their sound was akin to God Is My Co-Pilot playing The Feeding of the 5000 and Trout Mask Replica simultaneously while mainlining pixy stix. They were certainly a sight to behold as all members except the two drummers spent most of their time jumping spasmodically around in the audience (in tight bicycle shorts which appeared to be their band uniform) while somehow still managing to play their instruments. Singer, Kimya Lindale, spent so much time running around in the audience that it took me until almost the end of their set to realize that she was actually in the band; I mistook her for a rabid fan! After their all too brief set, local noise trio, Child Abuse, treated the sticky audience to forty-five minutes of standing around waiting for them to set up. When they finally finished abusing the crowd’s patience and began abusing their instruments, they filled the miniscule space with enough ugly sounds for several Cake Shops. Their lurching, mean-spirited music sounded like Sam McPheeters singing for the Jesus Lizard ass raping Suicide. While enjoy might be a strong word, I did appreciate what they were doing musically and their performance had a certain charming entertainment value. The highlight of their set was watching front man, Luke Calzonetti, spit a giant glob of saliva onto the ceiling. The goo proceeded to slowly ooze back down from the low ceiling like a malevolent, saliva stalactite, which came dangerously close to dripping on his mangled Casio keyboard. He swung his arm around, grabbing the menacing globule from midair just as it was about to detach itself and land on his instrument and then shoved it back into his mouth and gleefully swallowed.
After Child Abuse’s performance that lasted half as long as their set-up, it was finally time for those lovable scamps from Arab on Radar to take the stage. And take it they did, running out onto the tiny stage in their creepy proletariat band uniforms (black button down shirts and black slacks) and without so much as a ‘hello Cleveland’ ripped into an unrelenting forty minutes of macho, sexually inappropriate, vaguely homoerotic, aggro sonic Armageddon. The guitars were serrated chromatic blades carving away at the ear canal and the drums a furious, rumbling tribal tattoo, which created a skuzzy, tight fisted noisescape for anti-charismatic front man, Eric Paul (aka Mr. Pottymouth) to shock and amaze and spew forth his orifice obsessed lyrics. In the eight years that AOR has been dormant, Paul, has lost none of his disturbing ability to completely unnerve. He flopped around the stage in a disgusting pantomime of mental derangement screeching horrifically absurd lyrics as if he were a Thalidomide baby trapped in the body of the elderly Marquis de Sade. The band brought their own light show – harsh bare bulbs pointed at the audience and as they started playing the crowd erupted into a seething mess of sweaty, contorted silhouettes. The lights and the pit made the already insufferably hot and dingy atmosphere in the basement impenetrably claustrophobic. One song bled into another without a break and hardly a word from Paul, although at one point he did punctuate a rare half-minute of silence in between songs with what sounded like the wail of a tongueless child screaming, “I used to get hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigggghhhhhhhh!” (as he wriggled and flopped around the stage I thought to myself ‘used to’?) but it was unclear if this was a song title or simply an instance of over sharing on his part. If there ever was a case for recommending behavior modification through copious amounts of medication it would be Paul (as an interesting side note: he is one of only two people I have ever seen horrify an entire audience simply by reading from a book – in Paul’s case from his whimsically perverse, I Offered Myself As The Sea). He is an unhinged parody of a rock front man, sort of like the Anti-Mick Jagger.
The rest of the band was almost as entertaining to watch as Paul. Drummer, Craig Kureck, augmented his band uniform by wrapping himself in the bright red Christmas tree tinsel hanging over the back of the stage and as each song finished he would leap up from his stool, frantically wave his arms in the air for a few seconds sending tinsel shooting in every direction and then sit back down and start pounding out the next song. Guitarists, Steve Mattos and Jeff Schneider, jerked around the stage strangling their guitar necks as if they were offending priapic members. As they finished their set the crowd screamed for more even though the air in the room felt like hot wet wool wrapped around your entire body. The band returned to the stage after only a minute and Paul launched into a brief rant about NYC bands stealing Providence bands’ ideas which was by far the most he spoke during the entire show. They played two more twisted tunes, causing the crowd to begin writhing around with renewed energy. When the show ended, I couldn’t get out of that room fast enough. The putridly humid early August morning air felt like a cool ocean breeze after the confines of the Cake Shop. Of course I had to wade through the chooch apocalypse which had doubled and gotten more liquored up during the time I was inside.
One would think that I would’ve spent Sunday sleeping off my music binge but I capped off my rock and roll weekend by going to see Ken Russell’s cruelly anarchic film, The Devils, at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center. And, lest you think this was a more relaxing pursuit, rest assured that at certain points the film was both louder and more violently disturbing than anything I had seen or heard in the previous two days, but that is an entirely different story.
For More on all of the above artists:
No Babies
Child Abuse
Arab On Radar
More links soon!
I always feel out of place at Radio City Music Hall. Whenever I’m inside gawking at the opulent art deco interior, I think that any moment a large usher is going to tell me I have to leave because I’m not wearing a tie. But I dutifully showed up, along with several thousand other fans to see Jason Pierce lead his band Spiritualized plus an orchestra and choir in a performance of his classic Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space LP last Friday night at said venerable venue. If there is any modern album that actually deserves to be performed in its entirety at Radio City Music Hall with a string octet, a horn sextet, a white-gowned gospel choir, and a percussionist augmenting a six-piece rock band, it is definitely Ladies and Gentlemen…
After a late start, a mirror ball mishap and Kate Radley’s sampled voice introducing the album’s opening title track, the curtain finally rose over a stage crowded with musicians and equipment and a dazzling light show which included a backdrop made to look like the stars in deep space and harsh LED strobe lights (and let’s not forget the requisite dry iced smoke). It was impossible not to be awed by the visual spectacle but that was nothing compared to the dense layers of sound created by the dozens of musicians. Not content to simply play the album, Pierce rearranged most of the songs and utilized all the available musicians to maximum effect. For anyone familiar with the original album there were some unique surprises (a harmonica vs. gospel choir dueling solo during “No God Only Religion” being one stand out), some amazing arrangements (the choir overtaking the rest of the musicians on “Home of the Brave”), some especially captivating performances (“I Think I’m In Love”, “Broken Heart”, “Cool Waves”) and a great many moments where musicians and audience were blasted en masse into the furthest reaches of outer space (all the Varèse meets “Sister Ray” instrumental jams on “The Individual”, “No God…” and “Cop Shoot Cop”).
At times the effect of the very loud instrumental rumble coupled with the seizure-inducing LED strobe lights was nauseating – particularly when someone in the audience decided to blaze a joint during “The Individual”. But an album so steeped in heartbreak, drug addiction and ultimately the healing powers of rock and roll is bound to be a bit messy for performer and audience alike. There were certainly moments of blissful transcendence as well (the horn and choir breakdown on “Come Together”, the buildup of “Stay With Me”, the languid opening of “I Think I’m In Love”). After nearly an hour and a half of pummeling the audiences’ eyes and ears, the band received a well-deserved standing ovation at the end of the absolutely epic cacophony of album closer, “Cop Shoot Cop” and quickly returned to the stage for a brief encore.
They opened the encore with an amazing arrangement of “Out of Sight” from the 2001 LP, Let It Come Down. This became a unexpected highlight of the show as the band really blasted into the stratosphere with horns blazing, string players sawing away, guitarists rocking out with tremolos raging, wailing harmonica and full on choir back up for Pierce’s unusually impassioned vocals (coupled with the extraterrestrial lighting effects) all working together to add a lush and powerful explosion of sound and emotion to the originally more spare composition. And just when you thought they couldn’t top all that had gone before, they perfectly ended the evening with a gorgeous, Velvet Underground goes to church rendition of the Edwin Hawkins Singers staple “Oh Happy Day” (hey why let a perfectly good white-gowned gospel choir go to waste?).
The musicians received another standing ovation and as the house lights came up bringing everyone back down to Earth, I left feeling exhausted and exhilarated (as well as half deaf and blind), knowing I had just seen one hell of a show, in every sense of the word. Really that should’ve been enough to keep me going for quite a while but the following afternoon I made my way to Damrosch Park in Lincoln Center just as the MC was announcing the start of the second half of the Ponderosa Stomp: The Detroit Breakdown show. I found a seat as Death began their set of dirty rock smack downs. While the influence of bands like The Stooges and the MC5 was obvious, their music sounded more avant than proto punk.
As they performed “Politicians In My Eyes”, it occurred to me that the song could have easily been written yesterday rather than 35 years ago and it’s about the fear of being drafted for the Vietnam war! I couldn’t help thinking that if you sped them up a bit you’d have a more soulful Dead Kennedys or perhaps a less dubby Bad Brains and while I could see why they didn’t quite catch on back then it is sad to think it took over thirty years for them to get a measure of respect and recognition. Luckily Drag City has begun the process of saving them from obscurity by giving their old recordings wide release. I was impressed with their songs and their playing but many of the elderly people and weekending tourists in attendance seemed confused, dismayed and perhaps a little offended. I guess that is what you get when you schedule a band called Death to play outside in the middle of Lincoln Center at 5:00 pm on a Saturday!
The Gories
This enthusiasm could become a bit misguided as in the case of one overzealous fan that brought along his own tambourine and attempted to play along with Peg O’Neill’s barely competent drum beats. This created a rather annoying arrhythmic echo effect that was impossible to ignore and grew more pronounced as the set went on. Despite that, watching The Gories was a total blast; I especially enjoyed their interesting take on Suicide’s “Ghost Rider”! Following them was ? and the Mysterians and I truly wanted to see them play their signature hit “96 Tears” but I had to rush home to feed and walk the dog and then head into the heart of chooch darkness (the lower east side on a Saturday night) to see the triumphant return of Arab on Radar after an almost decade long hiatus.
I waded through pustulant wanker choked Ludlow Street to the Cake Shop and entered the dank, hot basement club just after Oakland, CA septet, No Babies, took the stage…and the floor. It’s a safe bet that even if the puny stage at Cake Shop was big enough to hold all the members of the band and their equipment, it could never have contained their manic performance. Their sound was akin to God Is My Co-Pilot playing The Feeding of the 5000 and Trout Mask Replica simultaneously while mainlining pixy stix. They were certainly a sight to behold as all members except the two drummers spent most of their time jumping spasmodically around in the audience (in tight bicycle shorts which appeared to be their band uniform) while somehow still managing to play their instruments. Singer, Kimya Lindale, spent so much time running around in the audience that it took me until almost the end of their set to realize that she was actually in the band; I mistook her for a rabid fan! After their all too brief set, local noise trio, Child Abuse, treated the sticky audience to forty-five minutes of standing around waiting for them to set up. When they finally finished abusing the crowd’s patience and began abusing their instruments, they filled the miniscule space with enough ugly sounds for several Cake Shops. Their lurching, mean-spirited music sounded like Sam McPheeters singing for the Jesus Lizard ass raping Suicide. While enjoy might be a strong word, I did appreciate what they were doing musically and their performance had a certain charming entertainment value. The highlight of their set was watching front man, Luke Calzonetti, spit a giant glob of saliva onto the ceiling. The goo proceeded to slowly ooze back down from the low ceiling like a malevolent, saliva stalactite, which came dangerously close to dripping on his mangled Casio keyboard. He swung his arm around, grabbing the menacing globule from midair just as it was about to detach itself and land on his instrument and then shoved it back into his mouth and gleefully swallowed.
After Child Abuse’s performance that lasted half as long as their set-up, it was finally time for those lovable scamps from Arab on Radar to take the stage. And take it they did, running out onto the tiny stage in their creepy proletariat band uniforms (black button down shirts and black slacks) and without so much as a ‘hello Cleveland’ ripped into an unrelenting forty minutes of macho, sexually inappropriate, vaguely homoerotic, aggro sonic Armageddon. The guitars were serrated chromatic blades carving away at the ear canal and the drums a furious, rumbling tribal tattoo, which created a skuzzy, tight fisted noisescape for anti-charismatic front man, Eric Paul (aka Mr. Pottymouth) to shock and amaze and spew forth his orifice obsessed lyrics. In the eight years that AOR has been dormant, Paul, has lost none of his disturbing ability to completely unnerve. He flopped around the stage in a disgusting pantomime of mental derangement screeching horrifically absurd lyrics as if he were a Thalidomide baby trapped in the body of the elderly Marquis de Sade. The band brought their own light show – harsh bare bulbs pointed at the audience and as they started playing the crowd erupted into a seething mess of sweaty, contorted silhouettes. The lights and the pit made the already insufferably hot and dingy atmosphere in the basement impenetrably claustrophobic. One song bled into another without a break and hardly a word from Paul, although at one point he did punctuate a rare half-minute of silence in between songs with what sounded like the wail of a tongueless child screaming, “I used to get hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigggghhhhhhhh!” (as he wriggled and flopped around the stage I thought to myself ‘used to’?) but it was unclear if this was a song title or simply an instance of over sharing on his part. If there ever was a case for recommending behavior modification through copious amounts of medication it would be Paul (as an interesting side note: he is one of only two people I have ever seen horrify an entire audience simply by reading from a book – in Paul’s case from his whimsically perverse, I Offered Myself As The Sea). He is an unhinged parody of a rock front man, sort of like the Anti-Mick Jagger.
The rest of the band was almost as entertaining to watch as Paul. Drummer, Craig Kureck, augmented his band uniform by wrapping himself in the bright red Christmas tree tinsel hanging over the back of the stage and as each song finished he would leap up from his stool, frantically wave his arms in the air for a few seconds sending tinsel shooting in every direction and then sit back down and start pounding out the next song. Guitarists, Steve Mattos and Jeff Schneider, jerked around the stage strangling their guitar necks as if they were offending priapic members. As they finished their set the crowd screamed for more even though the air in the room felt like hot wet wool wrapped around your entire body. The band returned to the stage after only a minute and Paul launched into a brief rant about NYC bands stealing Providence bands’ ideas which was by far the most he spoke during the entire show. They played two more twisted tunes, causing the crowd to begin writhing around with renewed energy. When the show ended, I couldn’t get out of that room fast enough. The putridly humid early August morning air felt like a cool ocean breeze after the confines of the Cake Shop. Of course I had to wade through the chooch apocalypse which had doubled and gotten more liquored up during the time I was inside.
One would think that I would’ve spent Sunday sleeping off my music binge but I capped off my rock and roll weekend by going to see Ken Russell’s cruelly anarchic film, The Devils, at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center. And, lest you think this was a more relaxing pursuit, rest assured that at certain points the film was both louder and more violently disturbing than anything I had seen or heard in the previous two days, but that is an entirely different story.
For More on all of the above artists:
No Babies
Child Abuse
Arab On Radar
More links soon!
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