Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Mar. 2nd, 2005 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaMusic is being very good this week.
Went to see the Melvins with Jon last week at the Electric Ballroom. I've technically witnessed them live before, soundtracking some nicely odd short films, but from behind a translucent screen so I hadn't seen them. And then they were making lots of interesting noise but not playing anything recognisable as songs.
I was unsure what we'd get this time and the support bands were bad bad bad, the sort that make me hop around in frustration at not having SON to hand so we could crash the stage and do everything a lot better. The first had some good sounds and some good riffs, heading for doom but with more traditional structure, but there was no need for all three string-fiddlers to be playing exactly the same thing for most of the songs. There were only enough ideas for two members of the band, effectively, and with no vocals or perceptible direction to the structures, no point in any of it. The second supports had a competent rhythm section fronted by a man struggling to be three people at once and not doing terribly well at being any of them. He'd have been a better rhythm guitarist if he wasn't breaking off early to try and slot some lead bits in, and the singing came off worst of all. The only remaining problemette being that with a full band playing just what the frontman had in mind they'd be retro-widdly metalesque but still rather pedestrian (forgive me using this term as an insult so much, nothing against pedestrians, I'm usually one myself, but one foot in front of the other for half an hour is no sort of way to make music) and I still wouldn't like them.
By the end of all that and in a week where a stomach upset left me stranded and confused in a world without food, I was knackered and falling asleep and thinking about the weary plod home already. Then these three blokes walk on and fiddle with instruments looking like people at home in their usual place of work who've come to do a job and are going to do it well. And bugger me sideways did they. There are three pieces of evidence I'd like to offer for the Melvins being the best band I've seen in ages.
One, the way recorded songs come out. Black Stooges and the unnamed track 2 that goes with it fom the 2002 album Hostile Ambient Takeover are, from the outside, abstract and complicated and in funny time signatures and made out of strange noises. Done live, a poor band would be trying to chase mechanically after the good thing they'd accidentally managed to make on the recording. The way the Melvins do it shows that they knew what they were about then and still do. They do it again on stage by playing the same ideas, this bit goes to this bit for this reason. It really is a song, not just a collection of weirdnesses. Whilst also being, of course, a collection of weirdnesses fascinatingly animated into a song. Yay.
What was the second again? Oh, something about being able to hold the stage, the crowd, it being a performance. When they stop and drop to feedback everyone is waiting to see what comes next. (I've been trying to get my head round how this works recently, to see what it is that makes some people able to hold a whole crowd - I went to see Skindred at the end of last year and the crown goes to Benjy Ward, unquestionably, making a roomful of teeny-metallers do whatever he says. Including dancehall. Now that's power. And supporting them were Toupe, a band who can make an entire audience salute instead of clap, in eerie silence, at the end of songs. See, I wanna know how to do this.) They had a firm hold, even through long improvised messing about with a giant gong and parade bass drum. The bassist was swaying in epicycles, in the through-pulse rather than the on-beat, throwing Jon right out but once he stopped watching and stuck to listening he couldn't stop dancing. My own knackeredness was forgotten, too busy being delighted by everything.
Third, the cover versions. Only a band who know just what they're doing and why can take a well-known song from outside their genre, play it through their own sounds and thus make it into something all their own. How many noise-metallers can play the Beatles' I Wanna Hold Your Hand? With it sounding so in place that half the audience probably didn't notice? And later in the same set, an Alice Cooper song, The Ballad Of Dwight Fry? Yeah, this is what we're looking for. It was a top quality gig, interesting in several ways, and Dale Crover is a truly excellent drummer.
Other music that has been ace: Bad Fucks rehearsal with a new song written. And Ed sounding so like Mike Reid as his voice went that Skinheads became a new experience in drumming whilst unable to see or breathe because of laughing so much. PJ rehearsal with a new song also in progress, with a nice manic drum bit in the middle up against nifty QuOTSA-second-album tidiness. With any luck a SON practice this weekend. New Fu Manchu album which hasn't properly sunk in yet but it wipes the floor with California Crossing; finding the ability to be really delighted with recorded music again after hardly listening to any for ages; finally getting the Exploited's Troops Of Tomorrow and hearing the original of War after long familiarity with the excellent reworking by Slayer and Ice-T; getting into a terribly pretentious-sounding conversation about the importance of rhythm in all music since Elvis on the late train home from London. Seeing a bass job I would love to do if only there were room go to a friend who I know is going to be good at it.
And Toupe are playing at the Freebutt on Saturday. It's going to be packed. There will be symbolic Grubbs burgers in honour of the new album beforehand and everything. Yeah.
Went to see the Melvins with Jon last week at the Electric Ballroom. I've technically witnessed them live before, soundtracking some nicely odd short films, but from behind a translucent screen so I hadn't seen them. And then they were making lots of interesting noise but not playing anything recognisable as songs.
I was unsure what we'd get this time and the support bands were bad bad bad, the sort that make me hop around in frustration at not having SON to hand so we could crash the stage and do everything a lot better. The first had some good sounds and some good riffs, heading for doom but with more traditional structure, but there was no need for all three string-fiddlers to be playing exactly the same thing for most of the songs. There were only enough ideas for two members of the band, effectively, and with no vocals or perceptible direction to the structures, no point in any of it. The second supports had a competent rhythm section fronted by a man struggling to be three people at once and not doing terribly well at being any of them. He'd have been a better rhythm guitarist if he wasn't breaking off early to try and slot some lead bits in, and the singing came off worst of all. The only remaining problemette being that with a full band playing just what the frontman had in mind they'd be retro-widdly metalesque but still rather pedestrian (forgive me using this term as an insult so much, nothing against pedestrians, I'm usually one myself, but one foot in front of the other for half an hour is no sort of way to make music) and I still wouldn't like them.
By the end of all that and in a week where a stomach upset left me stranded and confused in a world without food, I was knackered and falling asleep and thinking about the weary plod home already. Then these three blokes walk on and fiddle with instruments looking like people at home in their usual place of work who've come to do a job and are going to do it well. And bugger me sideways did they. There are three pieces of evidence I'd like to offer for the Melvins being the best band I've seen in ages.
One, the way recorded songs come out. Black Stooges and the unnamed track 2 that goes with it fom the 2002 album Hostile Ambient Takeover are, from the outside, abstract and complicated and in funny time signatures and made out of strange noises. Done live, a poor band would be trying to chase mechanically after the good thing they'd accidentally managed to make on the recording. The way the Melvins do it shows that they knew what they were about then and still do. They do it again on stage by playing the same ideas, this bit goes to this bit for this reason. It really is a song, not just a collection of weirdnesses. Whilst also being, of course, a collection of weirdnesses fascinatingly animated into a song. Yay.
What was the second again? Oh, something about being able to hold the stage, the crowd, it being a performance. When they stop and drop to feedback everyone is waiting to see what comes next. (I've been trying to get my head round how this works recently, to see what it is that makes some people able to hold a whole crowd - I went to see Skindred at the end of last year and the crown goes to Benjy Ward, unquestionably, making a roomful of teeny-metallers do whatever he says. Including dancehall. Now that's power. And supporting them were Toupe, a band who can make an entire audience salute instead of clap, in eerie silence, at the end of songs. See, I wanna know how to do this.) They had a firm hold, even through long improvised messing about with a giant gong and parade bass drum. The bassist was swaying in epicycles, in the through-pulse rather than the on-beat, throwing Jon right out but once he stopped watching and stuck to listening he couldn't stop dancing. My own knackeredness was forgotten, too busy being delighted by everything.
Third, the cover versions. Only a band who know just what they're doing and why can take a well-known song from outside their genre, play it through their own sounds and thus make it into something all their own. How many noise-metallers can play the Beatles' I Wanna Hold Your Hand? With it sounding so in place that half the audience probably didn't notice? And later in the same set, an Alice Cooper song, The Ballad Of Dwight Fry? Yeah, this is what we're looking for. It was a top quality gig, interesting in several ways, and Dale Crover is a truly excellent drummer.
Other music that has been ace: Bad Fucks rehearsal with a new song written. And Ed sounding so like Mike Reid as his voice went that Skinheads became a new experience in drumming whilst unable to see or breathe because of laughing so much. PJ rehearsal with a new song also in progress, with a nice manic drum bit in the middle up against nifty QuOTSA-second-album tidiness. With any luck a SON practice this weekend. New Fu Manchu album which hasn't properly sunk in yet but it wipes the floor with California Crossing; finding the ability to be really delighted with recorded music again after hardly listening to any for ages; finally getting the Exploited's Troops Of Tomorrow and hearing the original of War after long familiarity with the excellent reworking by Slayer and Ice-T; getting into a terribly pretentious-sounding conversation about the importance of rhythm in all music since Elvis on the late train home from London. Seeing a bass job I would love to do if only there were room go to a friend who I know is going to be good at it.
And Toupe are playing at the Freebutt on Saturday. It's going to be packed. There will be symbolic Grubbs burgers in honour of the new album beforehand and everything. Yeah.