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MEGA LIVE REVIEW: Yawn, Cold Cave, The Kills, Gaslamp Killer, Kid Sister and A-Trak @ First Unitarian Church, TLA and Voyeur 4/27
On Wednesday night I decided to take my chances, go for broke (well, at least, free) and play a little one-man game of "let's pretend it's SXSW": scoring comps to three separate shows and attempting to take them all in in a single night.
MEGA LIVE REVIEW: Yawn, Cold Cave, The Kills, Gaslamp Killer, Kid Sister and A-Trak @ First Unitarian Church, TLA and Voyeur 4/27
Oh My Goodness What That Man Can Do With A Crossfader
Along with the sudden onset of sweltery (pretend) summer, this Monday kicked off one of the most dizzying and jam-packed weeks of shows this town has seen in months. Maybe it’s the apex of the post-South-by-Southwest touring frenzy; in any case it’s truly been the stuff of R5 e-mail hyperbole (not that that’s exactly hard to come by). As a devoted freelance guest-list junkie, I arranged my weeknight plans accordingly. I ran into some unexpected trouble the first two nights of the week and ended up actually buying tickets to see Low on Monday (see my review for Cowbell Magazine’s Cowblog). and the unanticipated pair-up of YACHT and Lightning Bolt on Tuesday (a last-minute show conflation; multiple shades of sweaty euphoria ensued). But on Wednesday night I decided to take my chances, go for broke (well, at least, free) and play a little one-man game of “let’s pretend it’s SXSW”: scoring comps to three separate shows and attempting to take them all in in a single night.
Step one was a breeze: back again to the Unitarian Church basement (which already felt tropical, 20 minutes after doors opened) to catch Chicago up-and-comers Yawn. I found myself liking the fresh-faced foursome almost immediately, bopping along to their familiar-feeling but still charmingly cheerful poly-rhythmic, synth-flecked indie rock. They had some definite Animal Collective vibes — high warbly vocals; “tribal” drumming (from a standing-up drummer no less); shaggy hair — but with none of that pesky artiness getting in the way of the sunshiney pop. Also, the harmonies somehow reminded me more of the Everly Brothers than the Beach Boys. (Only partly because one song bore a passing melodic resemblance to “Til I Kissed You.”) I considered sticking around for a bit of Yuck, even though I’d caught some of their set at the real SXSW and my reaction was, mostly: yawn. (Hm, a Yawn-Yuck-Yacht triple-bill seems like a seriously missed opportunity.) And it was a shame to be missing psychedelically grooving headliners Tame Impala, but I had some serious business to attend to across town.
Like, dead serious. Or else seriously dead — it was hard to tell, as I entered the TLA to encounter a barrage of digital noise protracted and monotonous enough to make we wonder whether there was a technical malfunction or if this was some sort of melodramatic performance gesture to begin formerly local electro-goths Cold Cave’s opening set. It turned it out was actually the conclusion to their penultimate song, or the prelude to their final one, “Underworld USA” (I think?), which was decently energetic but not terribly enthralling. (And the near-darkness onstage meant there wasn’t much to connect with visually either.) The rest of the crowd seemed even less happy about the experience, which suggests that maybe I didn’t miss too much (I overheard some particularly nasty comments about the band.) Or maybe it was just an unfortunate booking mismatch. Or Kills fans are just narrow-minded.
The Kills, first of all, attracted one of the more diverse concert audiences, age- and style-wise, that I’ve seen in a while, and one of the best dressed. Secondly, they’re pretty great-looking themselves — guitarist Jamie Hince (the soon-to-be Mr. Kate Moss) has a kind of Gainsbourg/Jagger-ish ugly-sexy thing going on with his cartoonishly prominent lips, while Alison Mosshart has a surprisingly cherubic face under her wild mop of black hair, which was almost constantly flailing about, and seemed to be completely obscuring her face about half the time. Thirdly, and mostly, they absolutely rock. The amount of energy they were able to generate with just two people on stage was tremendous — relegating the percussion to a backing track actually seemed like the right move for once, if that gives any indication. And the color-changing jaguar-print backdrop didn’t hurt either. They whipped through a set of old and new stripped-bare blues-punk jams, each one of which felt fiercer and more coolly dangerous than the last. And though they skipped my favorite cut off the new record (“Nail In My Coffin”) they did return (after a particularly heartfelt and appreciative bow — there’s clearly a lot of love between this band and their fans) for a fitting ballad encore of “Last Goodbye,” as the stars came out to twinkle (on the jaguar-print backdrop).
The grand finale for the night was a quasi-Making Time event at Voyeur, which lacked most of the usual trappings of Making Time but did, for better or worse, take place late enough for me to catch all three acts on the Magic 8-Ball Tour. (Disappointingly, there was no giant magic 8-ball in evidence.) San Diego DJ/producer Gaslamp Killer (who enjoys inserting expletives into his handle, as well as most of the rest of his speech) was a somewhat perplexing (and overly talkative) combination of part stoner classic-rock fan (dropping “Immigrant Song,” “Watchtower,” “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” etc., and at one point extolling Japan for “all the awesome culture they’ve given us”); part record-collector nerd (calling out the provenance of his hipper records, er, mp3s — “Sao Paulo Brazil! 1977! Tom Ze!” — and misattributing Gianfranco Reverberi’s “Nel Cimitero Di Tucson” [the sample source of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”] to Ennio Morricone); and part seriously skilled albeit manically eclectic groovemonger — flipping everything from dubstep to hip-hop to Radiohead to “Mr. Sandman,” and making it fit together impressively well. The portions of his (overlong, hour-plus) set devoted to actual DJing were frequently astonishing and creative, and certainly entertaining; too bad he wore out most of the crowd’s good-will with his incessant yammering.
Kid Sister promised a fresh surge of dancefloor energy, and mostly delivered, though her brief set seemed to be plagued by mic issues (she was rarely loud enough, and she left the stage for a good 15 minutes while her DJ kept right on grooving) and she seemed a little distant behind her shades. Still, she came correct with some new bangers and the harder-hitting highlights from her 2009 debut album, closing with the frantic Chicago juke track “Switchboard.” (If that’s an actual dance, though, I’m still in the dark.)
And as I’ve seen him do on several other occasions, the adorably dapper DJ A-Trak brought the evening to a close with considerable charm and finesse, performing inside what was unveiled to be a fairly abstract, light-rigged stage set with two massive wood-grain vertical elements (a stylized, super-sized letter A, perhaps) with a matching, trapezoidal mixing table made to look like a giant piece of electronic equipment from a few decades back (a vintage radio? I wasn’t quite sure) — with buttons that actually worked. He laid down a smooth selection of filter-laden largely-electronic disco (vintage or modern, who can tell anymore) including his infectious Duck Sauce cut “aNYway” (which had the whole crowd singing along), keeping that groove going while still taking plenty of opportunities to show off his turntable wizardry, which… oh my goodness what that man can do with a crossfader. It’s hardly even worth trying to describe in words, but suffice to say that his set — which eventually veered into hip-hop and harder club-style breaks, with a few flash-move detours along the way — was a highlight and entirely satisfying conclusion to my night of musical excess; even when my dancing feet got too tired to do anything but stand and watch from the balcony.
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