the joy of suck
I was at The Record Bar last night, since for once I don’t have any gigs this weekend. I mention this because a) it’s my blog and I can prattle on about trivial shit if I want to, and b) it gave an interesting “control group” scenario to my usual Friday night.
Saturdays I am always burned out, hard to do anything but laze around (despite the fact that today I have a final mix to upload for the client to evaluate and four more songs to export in multi-track format for another engineer, not to mention housecleaning before a social thing this afternoon), just overall feeling pretty worthless. Last night, I had the same experience as usual—a loud, smoky bar, staying up till almost 3 am—but without moving equipment and beating the hell out of a drumkit for four hours.
It turns out that most of the burnout is just from being in a bar all night. My hands aren’t slightly swollen and my feet don’t feel like someone set upon them with a ball peen hammer, but most of the usual Saturday fryfest is in place. Maybe the physical effort isn’t as much as I thought. Or maybe my body is just in the habit of feeling this way, sort of a muscle memory.
While I’m on the subject, the bands at the Record Bar last night kind of had an ’80s theme. I missed The Bureau, a St. Louis band whose tunes on their MySpace page I liked pretty well, and supposedly they were good. But of course I got there just in time to watch them move their equipment offstage.
Next up was a heavily synth-oriented band, also from St. Louis, called Femme Fatality. I listened to parts of a couple songs on MySpace and they seemed interesting, but live they were not very.
The concept of the band seems to be two guys doing rap-style vocals over sequenced ’80s-style synth pop, backed up with a real band. Which is kind of a cool idea, but in point of fact I was over it after two songs, and increasingly annoyed after about four. There were no dynamics at all—they came on going about 90 miles an hour and left exactly the same.
About 80% of the mix was the sequenced synth parts. It was difficult to hear the vocals at first, but even when they were brought up it didn’t much help. There were no melodies and the vocalists’ rapid fire delivery made it impossible to make out more than the odd phrase here or there. Even between songs it was difficult to understand what was being said, though most of it seemed to be a snarl about how people weren’t getting into the show enough, and something about how they’d forgotten how hard it is to get a reaction in an over-21 bar. Ah, I get it—you’re used to playing to a bunch of high school kids who aren’t actually listening, but just plug into the energy and go wild as long as the beat continues. Sorry, some of us need to hear an actual song to get excited.
I honestly don’t know why they had a band. I could just barely make out how the live drums were slightly fattening up the sound of the sequenced percussion. The drummer obviously hadn’t been playing very long, though she did a reasonable job of keeping with the sequencer (of course, how could she miss?). I never heard a single note out of the other two guys, who played bass, guitars, and keyboards, even though they were playing as hard as they could.
And that’s a big part of what’s wrong with that band—they’re not necessary. All they are doing is doubling parts already covered at earsplitting volume by the sequenced synthesizers. There was no arrangement at all. Nothing was ever cut away to reveal something else underneath. There was absolutely no use of silence, and no sense of the band trying to get the crowd on their side, unless you call haranguing the crowd to get with it an attempt to relate. It also appeared even the amount of time between songs was sequenced. So there would be maybe ten seconds with no music, one of the singers would say something unintelligible, and then we’re off to the races again. Worse, the songs didn’t have endings; they merely stopped. I have never seen such a static, boring, one-dimensional show, which is odd since on the face of it the players were so frantic.
As usual, it’s much more fun to write about a band that sucks than a good one. Roman Numerals closed out the night with a thoroughly professional set. Their material is a bit reminiscent of Joy Division or The Cure or Gang of Four, though they don’t really sound like any of those bands. Special kudos to Ryan (formerly of the Getup Kids) on drums, who was as much fun to watch as to listen to. My only complaint was the PA volume, which was oppressive all night.
I’m not a crotchety old guy (well, maybe I am, but that’s not the point). I like it loud. It needs to be loud. But this was a sonic assault—I had earplugs jammed as far in as they would go, and it was still too fucking loud. The kind of loud where you can’t hear anything except loudness. I would have liked it a lot more if I could have really heard the songs, because they seemed like good songs. Instead all I could really say was, “Damn, that’s loud.”
Oh well, next week I’m back on the giving end instead of receiving, in the loud department.