I saw a show last night that inspired me and completely rocked my face off. I think the last time I can say that happened was probably in fall of 2004, half-way into my tenure as a student at NYU. That show was by a band then called Tarantula, and consisted of a cello, guitar/bassist, violin, and drummer. It was a style of music i had never previously seen executed live, a passionate, brooding, foreign sound which moved me from the inside out. It was at the Mercury Lounge, and it got me thinking about the ceiling of possibilities with performing live music. The songs they played were simultaneously caught between a romantic and futuristic place, and some foggy place and time in the past, and I found myself standing agape throughout the entire performance. Since then the band has gone through some changes, including shedding the cute violin girl, and changing their name to Tarantula AD, then Priestbird.
2004 was a long time ago, of course. The band that melted my face last night, april 22nd 2008, consisted of three young men named Chris, Alex, and Billy. They called themselves "the endless grift". I used to live with Chris in an old abandoned firehouse just east of nowhere in the East Williamsburg Industrial Park (ewip?), and I knew Alex's brother, Max, quite well during my high school days in LA. Personal associations aside, I have to say that this music moved me in a way that made my face scrunch up and my eyes water. I liked it so much so that I came home and vowed to write about them.
The parkside lounge's back room is hardly what you would call a typical NY rock club. The room is narrow, awkwardly long, and filled with tables and chairs and short waitresses delivering overpriced and under-filled drinks. The stage is raised only about 6 inches, and is decorated with a background resembling the make-shift "Merv Griffin" set which Kramer constructs in the Fusili Jerry episode of Seinfeld. . All of these elements contributed to a beautiful sense of the accidental ironic.
The trio dressed in a very sprockets-esque get-up of all black, with chris' t-shirt displaying a defiant, "FUCK MILK, GOT POT?" Before the show, I chatted with Chris and Alex, and did the usual pre-show shmooze, interrupted only by a cinematic slow clap which emanated from the back of the room. Someone asked Billy, "how long before you go on?" to which he replied, "Imminent...." the friend turned back to his party, clarifying sarcastically, "imminent......as in IMMINENTLY". It was clear the room was filled with friends. Alex peeked his head through the bright red tinsel streamers to call his band mates back for a pre-rock talk, after which the three took the stage. Upon settling into their battlestations - chris and billy flanking alex's drums with deadly nord and m-audio synths - alex muttered, "ready when you are...."
From the first crack of the snare, i knew i was going to like this. Like, REALLY, like this. Alex's brooding, heavy, psychedelic foundation on drums immediately filled the room with a sense of sway, and the booty bass synth flowing from the over-driven house amps made my intestines dance. I tried to describe this music to myself in my head, and all i could think of were words like, "heroin, awesome, trippy, hard, and ghoulish." I even wrote the words down on a napkin so as to remember them. Anchored by an almost jammy sense of dynamics from Alex's thematic drumming, the 4 songs this band played (about ten minutes each) moved in dark, creepy patterns, building towards serious peaks and coherent endings.
Billy's sparse vocals, like the secret prize in a box of cracker jack's, were surprising and satisfying against the backdrop of such full-of-life instrumental accompaniment. The sounds this band made last night were like no combination of sounds I've heard in a long time, and it made me feel good inside. I heard thick, trance-like bass coming from chris' side, and hard, shrill, overdriven melody out of billy's crappy house amp, and all of that set against the pulsing, sexy, scary drums.
I don't know if "the endless grift" has ever heard of "a place to bury strangers", but both bands frighten me in a similar way. Both are extrememly loud, producing volume sufficient to make a person cry a little bit. Above all, "the endless grift" is a band that makes good, hard, loud, artistic music. I cannot put it any more simply than that.
-Saddam.
