Wow. What an amazing show. What an amazingly late post. Post on album release on it’s way.
Now, we’ve played some bad shows at Bottom of the Hill. I won’t get into details, but let’s just say the chorus for one of the bands that we’ve played with in the past was “I only date crack-whores!” Not a great match. But this show was killer!
First we loaded in while Future of the Left (mostly ex-McClusky,) were sound checking, and it felt like we were intruding. The music was loud, the singer was playing a dissonant keyboard chord, or one big ugly note, and the performance of the song had the effortless tightness of a band near the end of its tour.
When we got on stage at 9:15, there must have been 5 people in the audience. By the time we finished the room seemed pretty full! Not a lot of girls in the audience, so we weren’t sure how they’d take us. We decided to play a mostly rocking set, but in the moment still decided to play mazel tov.
Anyway, we played well, I stood on some stuff and didn’t fall off of it, so I count it as successful. We also rocked really hard. Very happy with the set.
I guess I should mention that I made some relatively banal stage banter about stopping on time, and karma resolved the issue by cutting my mic signal during some key moments in some songs. The sound guy was on it, but even so I learned another great lesson about blah blah blah. Just don’t do it too much!
Disastroid were solid, loud, and clearly drew a good amount of people. Unselfconscious uncompromising straightforward rock and roll. Def enjoyed it.
Fotl played to a well warmed up rolicking crowd, and banged thru some great songs. I have to admit I was waiting for the single “The House that Hope Built,” but a las it never came. I asked the bassist afterwards why they didn’t play it, and he said they found it slowed the set down too much. Well it must’ve been a good decision because their performance ended with one of he most startling, frenetic conclusions I have ever seen at BOTH, and I saw The Mars Volta destroy the stage here!
Essentially, it was crazy! The bassist ran through the audience getting people to clap, and then threw his bass onto a seemingly random audienece member, who took up the bass playing like a Young King Arthur pulling Excaliber from the stone. Anxious but unskilled. The bassist continued to raise the enrgy level by forcibly pushing people’s raised hands together into claps, and then returned to the stage after mcub ado to twist the knobs on his pedals to distort the bass sound. Meanwhile, in what looked much like a game of checkers, the singer piecemeal removed integral parts of the drummers set while he was still playing. Starting with the crash, then the ride, then the entire kick and toms rack. The drummer moved in step with the drumset, now relocated near the edge of stage, literally never missing a beat, chasing the set with life and outstretched limb. Awesome!
Finally, the bassist returned to singing at the height of the noise and mimed Michael Jackson “Mumma-say mumma-muh dilop bahd dahp,” in a exciting thinnly veiled tribute.
When I thanked the singer for letting us play he honestly and with typical English wit replied, “I didn’t get to approve the listing of bands so, no problem.” I reiterated my thanks later, anyway. Ah, the English.
