Words and Photos by Andrew Parks

Before you get the wrong idea, the above headline isn’t meant to suggest we can’t enjoy a stoner-metal show without the help of a couple bong hits. It’s just that we’re talking about Sleep here—a band known for cannabis-coated album covers and an hour-long song/thoroughly-bootlegged third album called Dopesmoker. Which made us wonder: Would the towering riffs, sucker-punch drums, and guttural basslines of “Dragonaut,” “Holy Mountain,” and Dopesmoker’s intro sound as monumental to a severally sober person?

Our still-ringing ears say yes. As does the simple fact that last night’s Brooklyn Masonic Temple show was better than anything we’ve seen from vocalist/bassist Al Cisneros or guitarist Matt Pike, including the apocalyptic doom of Shrinebuilder, the scorched earth opuses of High On Fire, and the meditation-metal of Om. More than a simple cash-grabbing reunion gig, the staggering two-hour set felt like the rebirth of a band that ought to be personally thanked (or blamed, depending on your perspective) for post-Sabbath acts like the Sword, Witchcraft, and most of Tee Pee’s current roster. (The Queens-based label gave Dopesmoker a proper pressing in 2003.)

Whether any of this will led to another album remains to be seen, especially since longtime drummer Chris Hakius (a founding member of Om alongside Cisneros) is out of the picture again. Personally, we’d love to see Sleep hang onto Neurosis’ Jason Roeder for an actual record. After all, he didn’t sound like a hired gun last night. He sounded like the masochistic missing piece in the tightest power trio we’ve heard in quite some time.

Words and Photos by Andrew Parks

At least no one got knifed. Other than that, last night’s Wolf Eyes had more than a couple things in common with the NSFW sauna scene from Eastern Promises. Namely the nastiest ‘mosh pit’ we’ve seen since last year’s Converge show and a shirt-soaking room temperature that had to be hovering around 100 degrees. Music wise, the Midwestern masochists started things off a little slower than the last time we saw them—sandwiched between Pig Destroyer and Whitehouse (!) at North Six)—by switching gears from a slow-burning blend of muddy beats and blustery chords to an all-out assault that might as well have been a hardcore show, circa 1982.

We invite you to survey the damage after the jump, including two flashbulb-lit video clips and a stack of center stage photos that include a couple cameos from another noise icon, Dominick Fernow of Prurient and Cold Cave…

[Photos by Jen Maler]

By Andrew Parks

“Who are these guys?”

“They’re called Animal Collective.”

“They a rock band or something?”

“Kinda.”

Welcome to one of many awkward exchanges self-titled had with audience members at the Guggenheim premiere of “Transverse Temporal Gyrus,” a performance art piece featuring the music of Animal Collective and the visuals of Danny Perez. (Longtime s/t readers will remember him as the guy who beamed projections onto Black Dice for us a couple years ago.)

That last conversation was with a member of the museum’s security team, an outside company brought in to corral any acid casualties who crumbled under the weight of the trio’s ruptured samples and prismatic synths. (Not to mention those masks, the Eyes Wide Shut cherry on the top of costumes that bridged the gap between Mickey Mouse and a sacrifice-happy black mass.) Casualties like the girl we saw on a subway platform afterward. She was a little freaked out. Or as her boyfriend put it—and I’m not making this up—”Those weren’t ghosts, hunny. They were just modulations of sound.”

See, this is why I stopped taking psychedelics after an ‘incident’ several years ago—because grown ass men have real problems, problems that don’t respond to wobbly brain waves very well. So what was “Transverse Temporal Gyrus” like if you weren’t high? A tongue twister of a title with little payoff? Not exactly. If you went into the night with the wrong attitude—or the hope that they’d suddenly break into an A/V version of “Banshee Beat”—you probably left feeling cheated, a little outraged at just how “pretentious!” Animal Collective is.

My response to that would be, where have you been all these years? While Animal Collective’s a band, first and foremost, they’ve always treated their music like an art project. Hence why they spent years performing unreleased songs rather than the record they just released—because Animal Collective’s body of work is a canvas that keeps getting whited-out and splattered every few years.

Not to get all “I was there” on you, but Animal Collective kinda bugged me out the first time I saw them—at a semi-legal art space in Philly more than five years ago (see: the above video). The idea that they’d eventually become a 21st century pop band would have seemed ludicrous at the time. So to see them go from a glorious mess to a sold-out Guggenheim show is to feel like the good guys won this time. Pretentious or not, Animal Collective have built an army of face-painted fans (we’ll be posting photos of them in a bit) on the back of music that challenges as much as it rewards. And if they want to pour their growing bank accounts into stage props and mind-fucking movies, more power to them. Hey, it’s better than someone like Spoon—indie rock vets who keep writing the same…fucking…record, over and over again. Yeah, it’s a damn good record, but haven’t we heard it all before?

That said, I totally understand the Guggenheim-goer that said the following: “Give me something I can dance to.”

Words and Photos by Andrew Parks

“Marco!”

“Polo!”

And there you have it. It took Sunn O))) 15 minutes, tops, to lose their stranglehold on a crowd of curious masochists, here at Brooklyn’s Masonic Temple to soak up pea-soupy patches of fog and feedback that feels like a fireball to the face. Or at the very least, a bass-heavy full body massage.

Of course, you’ve gotta be willing to wade through waves of slowwww, shape-shifting distortion for a good 90 minutes if you want the true Sunn O))) experience. And, well, we thought about leaving several times during the quartet’s (rounded out by multi-instrumentalist Steve Moore and Mayhem frontman Attila Csihar) late-night set. Not because we were surprised and/or bored by what we were witnessing.

If anything, we were simply distracted by all the goddamn smoke. We get why the duo uses it—to establish a meditative atmosphere and make those robes seem a tad less silly—but they were pumping out enough plumes of the stuff to choke a steel-lunged fireman. The group’s 2006 bill with Boris and Oren Ambarchi, on the other hand, balanced the B-movie theatrics with the music itself, an unending hymn of praise to The Riff.

Thank Hades for the unparalleled operatic vocals of the almighty Attila, then. While we haven’t the faintest idea what he was shrieking/shouting/sing-speaking about throughout Sunn’s set, there’s really nothing like watching a scarily-intense Hungarian in his very own Hellraiser costume, complete with laser claws and a crown of thorns. Then there was his tree get-up, a Guillermo del Toro-like creation that could easily play a starring role in our next never-ending nightmare.

Here’s the thing, though: Attila doesn’t need to pretend every night is Halloween to hold our attention. His voice is undeniably haunting, and creepy in parts that should come off as pure camp. And that stage presence—wow. Get this guy a role in Broadway’s first black-metal-scored play, please. Thanks.

Words and Photos by Andrew Parks

You know what grindcore is? Funny. And we mean that in the nicest way possible. An explanation, via Friday night’s Blackened Music bill at Brooklyn’s Masonic Temple…

Repulsion

True to every stereotype about metal’s most simple but satisfying scene, Pig Destroyer, Repulsion and Brutal Truth basically bludgeoned a half-filled room with slight variations of the same song for three hours, give or take a few set changes and beer breaks. While Repulsion’s incredibly rare set—their first NYC appearance since forming more than two decades ago—was the clear draw here (many people left after they played), PxDx cemented their position at the top of  today’s grindcore heap with a frenzied set that pulled cuts from their entire catalog. The crowd was out of control in all the right ways, too, treating the stage as their launching pad and the floor as their very own Coliseum.

As you’ll see in the photos below and a separate post of videos from the show, we spent most of the night getting clobbered by crowd riders and ugly fat dudes. Which was fine—as someone said to us after the show, “The thing I love about Pig Destroyer, is that you can actually hear some riffs in there.” Not to mention the bbbbuuzzzzzzzzz of Blake Harrison’s spark-slinging table saw, who proved that grind bands don’t need bassists; they need power tools.

Pig Destroyer

Cobra Starship get all hot and bothered, leave us all cold and bored.

Words and Photos by Sean Edgar

So self-titled really isn’t sure what kind of publicity Diesel is trying to attract with their increasingly ape-shit free shows. Starting off last fall as a full international tour—including a carnival-esque stop at the Brooklyn Waterfront—its first iteration sported a very pregnant M.I.A., Hot Chip, Franz Ferdinand and a host of PR-baiting hyperbole, hell-bent on occupying every single indie blogger for a solid five hours. Last night, Webster Hall witnessed the company’s latest concert, the Diesel:U:Music tour with a lineup that included Passion Pit, Cobra Starship and The Roots. The weird thing about these promotional orgies is that a name brand designer is actually trying to build street cred among the unwashed hipster masses. Either Salvation Army’s going to have to step up its game or Mugatu knew what was what.

Kanye West

Things started off benignly enough with a 3-hour camp out session at the “Red Carpet” (which bears a striking resemblance to a 10-foot stretch of the Webster lobby), where such personalities as designer Richie Rich, some football player from the Giants and old American Idol contestant Jared Cotter stopped by to pose. (I’d like to thank my Mom for helping me identify the picture on the latter.) Then the looming publicists started intoxicating the photographers with promises of “Emile Hirsch” and “Rihanna” in the background. In their defense, they might have been there, but the evening was turning into the celebrity edition of Waiting For Godot, so up to the actual music I went.

For the first time ever, I found myself wading through a sea of high heels, peroxide and actual fashion sense on the Webster dance floor. Passion Pit brought a tidal wave of blistering synths and tight chops that marked a nice progression for a young band that received a premature dose of overwhelming buzz and expectation. Cobra Starship wasn’t very good, but they have a really, really photogenic keyboardist. The first hint of promised A-list shenanigans arrived when Kanye West helped Virginia Beach rappers Clipse on their collaboration, “Kinda Like A Big Deal.” While Ye’s stage time probably lasted as long as a trip to the bar, it was a nice shot of expected spontaneity into the night.

And then there’s the headliners, The Roots. What can you say for Philadelphia’s finest that hasn’t been said before? They consistently make excellent hip-hop jam records (we’re on #9 for those counting); their backing band consists of freakishly talented improv musicians who can bisect a beat five different ways; and they still rock harder than a geologist despite their new job providing rim-shots for Jimmy Fallon on late-night TV. And they also apparently have a thing for Icelandic pixie Lykke Li, who joined them on their last three tracks including a spiked rendition of her underground hit, “Dance Dance Dance.”

Free music, free alcohol, free irony: check, check, check. Keep up the good work, Diesel.

Kanye and the Clipse

Lykke Li

The Roots

Passion Pit

Cobra Starship's 'photogenic keyboardist'

Words and Photos by Aaron Richter

First things first, Black Lips—known and notorious for their outrageous onstage antics (spitting, peeing, penis waggling and the like)—were pretty much on their best behavior. Maybe a bit docile, removed, sleepy, out of it and, well, not very good at all, musically speaking. But the Atlanta group’s Sunday set at the Williamsburg Waterfront for the JellyNYC Pool Parties still might be one of the finest we’ve seen from the group—and it doesn’t even matter that they were rather shit at doing what they were onstage to do: play their songs adequately well and act like idiots.

Rather, it was the crowd that absolutely stole the show. From the first song onward security was running around batty as the crowd writhed about and swarmed forward, eventually collapsing the flimsy barricade and spewing into the photo pit. The fans crowd-surfed with 40s in hand, hurled shoes at the band, jumped onstage and even got into it with an overeager security staffer at one point, which led Cole Alexander to rush the beefy body with a swift smack and shove to get him off an abused mosher. “Hey, don’t hurt our fans,” Alexander pleaded from the stage. The set ended manically, the stage littered with event staff to control the crowd (one bruiser even grabbed a guitar-less Jared Swilley before being informed that “No, man, don’t! He’s in the band”), and the Lips, feeding off their fans’ chaotic exuberance, played on through sound-board threats to cut off their instruments. Hell yeah. Who even cared that …Trail of Dead was supposed to play next (their set got cancelled)? We left. Satisfied.

[Photos/Text by Andrew Parks]

You know, we’ve always loved the idea—a brother/sister combo with an incredible amount of creativity and a consistent fuck-all philosophy—of the Fiery Furnaces. The music? In most cases, not so much.

So what was it about last night that made us suddenly care about their songs as opposed to simply their ideas? Well for starters, the group’s in-the-round set mostly stuck to selections from next month’s I’m Going Away LP, which is easily the most accessible Friedberger album in years; maybe even the best since Gallowsbird’s Bark. Speaking of the Furnaces’s first full-length, they plucked two tracks from it on Thursday night—”Leaky Tunney” and “Worry Worry.” Other catalogue-skimming cuts made an appearance, including two surprises from the duo’s 2005 EP (“Here Comes the Summer” and an ‘amen sister!’ rendition of “Single Again”), but most of the evening came off like inflamed takes on classic rock. The only thing missing? A Hendrix cover. Bonus points for the hammerhead drumming of Bob D’Amico, too.

Here’s what you Fiery fanatics missed…

Fiery Furnaces @ Le Poisson Rouge, 6.11.09:
Here Comes the Summer
Leaky Tunnel
Chris Michaels
I’m Going Away
End Is Near
Charmaine Champagne
Cut the Cake
Staring at the Steeple
Even in the Rain
Keep Me in Dark
Lost At Sea
Cups and Punches
Take Me Round Again
Drive To Dallas
Duplexes of the Dead
Automatic Husband
Ex-Guru
Worry Worry

Encore:
Single Again

[Photos by Aaron Richter]

By Andrew Parks

As much as the entire self-titled staff enjoyed The Kills‘ headlining Music Hall of Williamsburg set last night—ever-present backing track, and all—half of us left at the start of the encore. The idea being a quick escape, before the band’s down & dirty night anthems (“Sour Cherry,” “Getting Down,” “Hook and Line”) drove us to endless rounds of chilled whiskey.

What we didn’t expect was the following slightly disturbing text message from s/t’s associate editor…

“Whoa! That dude got knocked on top of me!”

“What dude?”

“[Guitarist/singer] Jamie [Hince] just punched a dude in the face!!!!”

Aaron later explained, via E-mail:

So it’s the second to last song and Jamie starts motioning to someone in the crowd. He’s playing right above me and jerking his guitar downward near my face and pointing down to where I’m standing. I look back and see someone in the crowd who he seems to be looking at—a tall guy with a buzzed haircut, who looks drunk and is holding up two fingers at Jamie…like how British people give the finger. The guy makes his way up front and stands right next to me. Jamie is jabbing him in the face with his guitar head, not hard, just like little pokes. At the time it seemed playful enough. I could have swore Jamie was laughing about it or at least giving us a devilish grin. Keep in mind this is all while the song is still going.

The guy keeps giving Jamie the fingers, now with both hands. Jamie starts yelling, “Come on up here!” At this point, I’m confused but under the impression that they’re totally buddies having a laugh, and Jamie aggressively grabs the dude by his shoulders to pull him onstage. I grab the guy’s legs to help out, assuming  it’s all fun and games. But everything got weird as soon as he got on the stage. First he looked like he was going to pass out—sorta just barely there. The song ends. Alison [Mosshart, also of The Dead Weather] starts saying, “Who is this guy?” And the dude gets up and spreads his arms to walk over toward Alison. She freaks and scurries away. The stage crew tries to grab the guy, but Jamie gets him first and throws him up against the speaker stack.

It all happened so fast, so I’m not 100-percent sure Jamie actually threw a punch or if he just pushed him. But I remember the guy getting knocked the fuck out and hurtled off the stage by Jamie—basically tossed over my shoulder. Dude was crumpled in a heap on the floor, and I thought he was dead for a brief second. Security came to escort the guy out, and Jamie and Alison launched into an insane cover of Captain Beefheart’s “Dropout Boogie.” My hands were shaking. How I didn’t manage to get any photos of it, I have no idea. But that’s some real rock ‘n’ roll shit. I’m sure Jamie’s in jail right now. I mean, how can he not be?

As far as we know, Jamie is not in jail at the moment, although we hear the Kills camp is worried about a potential assault & battery charge. The guy—a French fan, we’ve been told—he haymakered had apparently been heckling him all night, and is probably regretting it right now. Maybe he was simply “sick of boombox bands,” like the cranky hulk of a man we ran into on the way out—a dude who simply wouldn’t drop the fact that the Kills play with pre-programmed beats rather than a drummer. Whatever the case, let that be a lesson that you should never leave a show early.

Now, for some more photos and three full live clips…

Dominic Aitchison of Mogwai bows down before the one he serves.

[Photos/Text by Andrew Parks; slideshow available here]

“Can you turn it up? I’m not deaf yet!”

Funny you should say that, sir, because our ears aren’t ringing yet, either. In fact, we’re able to actually formulate concrete thoughts in the midst of Mogwai’s second night at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. For the moment, at least, as the godfathers of mostly-instrumental madness explore another exercise in peaks and valleys, raw power and restraint.

Well that was the case, until Scotland’s post-rock all stars decided to stop fucking around and start getting real—real loud, catching us off guard with the relentless distorted riff sections of “Summer.” If there was ever any doubt as to why Mogwai’s influenced so many metal bands over the years, the group’s masterful performance of this early single eliminated that with the cold-hearted swiftness of a hit and run accident.

Other portions of the evening’s catalogue-skimming program weren’t so immediate or direct. For one thing, there was the piano/beat-driven procession of “Auto Rock” and “Friend of the Night,” which eventually segued into a soaring version of “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead.” And then there was “Cody,” the closest Mogwai comes to an unadulterated love song.

“That was for the guy who asked us to bring the pain,” joked guitarist Stuart Braithwaite, after delivering the song’s hushed, unfiltered melodies. (Guitarist/keyboardist Barry Burns ran most of the band’s other ’singing parts’ through his vocoder.)

Dude, you have no idea.

On a side note, we apologize for the cock tease nature of the video clip below, but a security guard told us to stop filming right before Mogwai hit the ground running. That’s probably because this week’s Brooklyn residency is being filmed for a future DVD release…

Mogwai @ Music Hall of Williamsburg, 4.28.09:
Yes! I Am a Long Way From Home
Hunted By a Freak
Scotland’s Shame
Cody
Summer
SmallChildren
Friend of the Night
Auto Rock
I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead
I Love You, I’m Going To Blow Up Your School
2 Rights Make 1 Wrong
We’re No Here

Encore:
Like Herod
Batcat