Boris and Red Sparowes at the Great American Music Hall
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| Boris |
Better than: staying home with an over-amplified radio and a broken Lite Brite
To paraphrase Chekhov, a gong on the mantelpiece in act one had better go off by act three. At the Great American Music Hall last night, Atsuo, vocalist-cum-drummer of Japanese spazz-drone legends Boris -- and also the closest human equivalent to Animal from the Muppets you'll ever have the fortune to see -- took care of the suspense with a few massive thwacks of the huge Zildjian gong behind him before the band played a single note, then let it remain ornamental for the rest of the evening. Mostly.
Noise-wise, nobody missed it. Besides Atsuo, Boris comprises two dudes and a lady who are deadly serious about distortion, who keep very close tabs on the towering walls of gravelly fuzz coming out of their speaker stacks; at the back of the hall, the sound man sat hunched over three pages of detailed instructions, mapped out song by song. Even when they're playing a slow, bluesy vamp, as they are wont to do now and then, a squealing one-note-at-a-time guitar solo is never far off. Just because they're perfectly calm on stage, noodling over some essentially poppy chord progression, doesn't mean they're not also shredding out a huge, impeccably textured squall of volume. According to the phone recorder of someone in front of me, their set teetered consistently on the brink of 100 decibels.
They also have their own label, which is called Fangs Anal Satan.
Whereas Boris's genre-defying records -- of which there are many, including collaborations with Sunn O))), Merzbow, and pretty much anyone else you associate with massive sheets of noise -- play up the frenzy in more or less recognizable packages, there's something soothingly meditative about their live show. Even during their cruelest thrash sessions or their most raucous double-necked guitar freakouts, they never seem too preoccupied with where the song is going. Only a few songs sounded like their album counterparts ("Farewell," the opening number from 2005's Pink, made a nice introductory foothold, but then all bets were off). Instead, they came across as alien species from some impossibly noisy planet, let out to feed and breed and transmogrify, kept on a long leash all the while by musicians who were just a little bit alien themselves.
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| Red Sparowes |
Los Angeles's Red Sparowes, on the other hand, played their spaced-out instrumental odysseys close to the fold. The five members -- including guitarist Bryant Clifford Meyer of the late Isis and drummer Dave Clifford of Pleasure Forever -- dig into interlocking parts that move together through heavily structured songs, and their live set tends to aspire to reproduce the just-so equilibrium of their albums. It doesn't always work out that way, and last night someone or other always seemed lost in the swirl, restrained from wandering off toward unexplored places.
The most satisfying pieces in the set came from their excellent 2005 debut, At the Soundless Dawn, whose repeating passages are given a lovely, lonely air by the sound of Greg Burns's pedal steel guitar (popular music's most neglected instrument). Selections from later albums stretched that base out in more cerebral, pseudo-psychedelic dimensions, which meshed nicely with the meandering video reel projected behind the band -- at least until the JFK assassination-simulating, dollar bill-folding conspiracy theory film toward the end. No telling what that was about. Then again, a gong would have been pretty weird too.
Critic's notebook: Helms Alas! Showed up too late for Helms Alee. Thanks, dude taking forever in the ticket booth line.
Overheard: "This is the only time in your life you'll see a long line for the men's room and none for the women's. What a sausage fest."
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