Barbelith Underground > Radio & Music > All Tomorrow's Parties 2004

Part Two; SATURDAY! (Sonic Youth day, hijacked by Lightning Bolt)

FUCK

Goodness me, how to summarise the surprisingly wonderful enigma of a band that is Fuck… Like Deerhoof, they prove to be annoying in theory, yet thoroughly entertaining in practice. The nearest I can get to a neat summary is to say ‘imagine if the Bonzo Dog Band were a Chicago style avant-pop band’.
From what I previously knew of them, they sounded perilously close to Primus style student humour horror – surely a band who released an album called ‘Those Are Not My Bongos’ needs to be approached with caution, right? They really do have some great gimmicks though – genuinely funny slapstick routines and other ingenious antics punctuate their songs, and they pack in the music altogether halfway through to indulge in a fantastic parody of a magic show culminating in the bass player, wearing a stars and stripes crash helmet, breaking wooden blocks with words like ‘EVIL’ and ‘TERROR’ written on them with his head. We all laugh loads. There’s a really odd tension though between their on-stage comedy antics and their actual music, which more often than not seems quiet, restrained, haunting and really rather good – not unlike a less obtuse Joan of Arc. So then, we have here that incredibly rare thing – a comedy band who succeed in both actually being funny, and in making worthwhile music. Great name too of course.

CARLA BOZULICH / NELS CLINE

Fresh from seeing Fuck upstairs, we only catch the last couple of songs from Carla, Nels and pals, but it sounds really, really good. Really powerful sounding stuff which I won’t embarrass myself by trying to describe.

DOUBLE LEOPARDS

I’d read somewhere that Double Leopards are a ‘noise band’, which I took to mean just a noisy rock group, but not so – they’re the real deal, the primarily female band spending their performance hunched over their amps and effects units, bringing forth a storm of dark ambient noise, their favourite trick being to moan and grunt into a microphone and cover the sound in god knows how many layers of scuzz and FX and delay, creating completely inhuman textures of horror movie droning which are genuinely rather disturbing. Far more varied and interesting than the likes of Merzbow, yet still horrifying enough so you really wouldn’t want to listen to it whilst wandering through the streets at night, Double Leopards are doing some really fascinating, nasty stuff with their noise.

THURSTON MOORE AND JIM O’ROURKE JAMMING WITH THIS BEARDED SAXOPHONIST DUDE

I’m pretty sure this performance wasn’t officially listed, and it certainly wasn’t what I expected to see when I wondered into the downstairs room after a quick lunch. It was bloody good though – I’m a bit sceptical about a lot of free-improv stuff, but this was the kind I really like. Not just some pointless fucking around for bored Wire readers (see Jackie-O Motherfucker review, below), but a big steaming pile of glorious, warm, excitable noise flying around all over the place like Sun-Ra falling down a giant spiral staircase to the centre of the universe and never coming back. Groovy.

OOIOO

Oh, OOIOO were absolutely wonderful. I can’t remember many of the precise details of what they did, but I think I was mildly stoned at this point and just got compleeeetely lost in it, journeying along to somewhere with a big smile on my face following the different instruments along in a state of complete happiness. God bless Japanese psychedelia for existing. The only specific thing I can actually remember is that Yoshimi’s drumming sounded rather like her Boredoms stuff only slower.

ANGELBLOOD

At this point just about everybody has charged off downstairs to see Erase Errata (I'm really annoyed I missed them, but with a line-up this good, some sacrifices need to be made), who don’t actually start playing until Angelblood finish, so I decide to hang around. Angelblood really aren’t the kind of band I’d expected to see at ATP at all, and I salute the broadness of Sonic Youth’s musical mindset in selecting them to play. They’re from ‘Budapest via Brooklyn’ apparently, and I suppose what they do could be crudely summed up as ‘psychedelic metal’. Not metal in the sense that they’re loud and fast, cos they’re not really, but rather that they clearly come from a metal background. They’ve got two guitarists who lay down a big mess of awesome soloing shit throughout, over which two female singers layer drawn out, gothic vocals. It resembles a sort of a completely hazy, smoked out version of the gothic school of black metal, only with a far more varied and experimental noise and none of the OTT shock-rock shtick. There are probably comparisons with Bardo Pond to be drawn, although the main difference is that Angleblood’s guitar sound has that cold and clinical metal thing going on, whereas Bardo’s is very warm and fuzzy, and the metal influence also means the vocals are a little more sort of bold and faux-dramatic. It’s a shame Angleblood only get to play to about 40 people, cos I think they’re a pretty unique and enjoyable band who are doing really good things in a genre nobody cool listens to much.

LE TIGRE

Yaaaaaay! Le Tigre! Le Tigre are brilliant. Obviously this isn’t as good as their show in London a while back, cos that was more like a rally in support of all that is good and right in the world, whereas this is just a half hour (?) festival slots. But still - they play all the hits. Jump up and down time!

VINCENT GALLO

Vincent Gallo certainly doesn’t play all the hits. Unless you think the idea of Rush covering Mogwai constitutes a hit. I was under the impression that Gallo did some kind of singer-songwriter type thing. Not so apparently – he seems to play bass in a power trio doing utterly gratuitous instrumental guitar wanking. Whatever. For someone who purports to be a solo artist he seems to make remarkably little of his own music, although he does scowl at his pals like he’s thinking “I’ve painstakingly taught them to play every note of this and if they mess it up, I’m going to beat them!” But then he scowls at everyone like that.
His sole contribution to my festival experience consists of making me stand around in a crowded room for an extra ninety minutes before I get to see Sonic Youth.

SONIC YOUTH

Finally, Sonic Youth! The crowd is terrible – it’s like, y’know, a proper festival, with people being crushed to death and stomped and drowned in beer. Due to obsessive perseverance I manage to spend the first couple of songs close enough to get some good photos, before retreating to a safe distance to actually enjoy the music. Now, obviously I’m an enormous Sonic Youth fan, so I enjoyed it massively – they did loads of songs from their forthcoming album “Nurse”, including one called “paper cut exit” which was absolutely astonishing. However, many people who aren’t enormous SY fans seemed to express the view that the band, well, kind of ‘phoned it in’ a little tonight. It wasn’t quite as great as it perhaps could have been – they seemed to play in a way that was kind of rushed, the singing and guitars both sounding a little slurred… They did make absolutely loads of noise – Thurston’s new favourite trick seems to be to pull the cord out of his guitar and bang it on things at every opportunity, and with three hideously detuned guitars on the go, the feedback is massive. But they didn’t pull any tricks out of the hat to really make it a magical performance – the old songs they played were the same ones they’ve always played in recent years – Mote, White Kross and Drunk Butterfly – and… God, I’m not sure how this review has ended up sounding so negative, cos I still love their music and had a fantastic time listening to all the wild noise and screamed for more, but, er, yeah – I don’t think they really did anything this evening to convince doubters that they really are as great as people like me keep saying they are, and because of that they annoyed me, cos they’ve still got the potential to be so, so amazing and to really show the fairly large contingent of ambivalent people in the crowd what they can do (I mean how great would it be if they did a really wild run through ‘The Sprawl’ or ‘Washing Machine’ and really got some beautiful structure/chaos/structure guitar heaven going on rather than just random feedback?). But they don’t – they just play a quick, noisy “let’s get outta here” festival set.

LIGHTNING BOLT

The second SY finish, Lightning Bolt crank it up from the opposite corner of the packed out room and…. Madness, utter fucking madness… I’m too weak to make a charge into the fray, so a stagger about half towards them and call it a day, gasping at the sight of several hundred sweat-drenched bodies trampling over each other like a berserk herd of buffalo that desperately want to fuck something in the corner, fists pounding the air and the all-consuming rhythmic noise blasts the room, not quite a loud as it should be. Er, yes, anyway, there’s a real post-apocalyptic vibe around where I’m standing, the ground strewn with debris, and everybody seems to have turned into a scary maniac.. several people start trying to talk to me, but what they’re saying is completely incomprehensible.. a few hours ago they were all polite middle class Birtish indie kids, but now it’s like talking to brain-fried hobos at a satanic death valley prayer meeting. Just say no, kids.
The Lightning Bolt drummer gets on a box and orders the first twenty or so rows of people to sit down, so that more of the audience can get a glimpse of the legendary noise-beasts. So I slip down along with the rest, and at that moment, I’m sure I’ve put my hand down on a big shard of broken beer bottle glass – I can feel it going in, and I scream “oh, fuck!!”, and look at my hand – no cut. What happened? I really don’t know.
And now, cos of the sitting down thing, I can actually SEE Lightning Bolt! From their music I kind of had a mental image of them actually being, y’know, monsters – huge, pulsating purple and green horn-ed beasts like something out of an ugly ‘80s fantasy movie. I suppose I should have been prepared for the disappointment of finding out they’re actually just regular human beings. But then do regular human being make music like this? I think in general, they do not. It’s a testament to the uniqueness and primal power of Lightning Bolt’s music that, as an underground band on a tiny label making their first trip to the UK, they’re already headlining All Tomorrow’s Parties, playing to what must be five hundred or more screaming mentalist fanatics. Describing their music would be stupid – if you’ve heard what they do played at sufficient volume, you’re not going to forget it anytime soon. Fucking Lightning Bolt man, fuck..

Hope nobody minds me posting all this verbose junk. Sunday coming soon.

C'mere, there's more.

Saturday - or “Thanks, Thurston.”

It’s worth noting that the whole “choosing between two different bands you know nothing about” thing is fraught with peril, and this is not helped by the tendency of the text that accompanies each band name (in yr handy pocket-sized guide to the line-up schedule) to be more cryptic and poetic than informative. Stephen Malkmus’ notes are relatively helpful (the drummer from Enon “plays ’78 disco beats way convincingly”, thus tipping me off to their goodness; The Shins “have a lot of songs, in the traditional sense”, thus tipping me… yeah, you guessed it), not to mention amusing - under his own name is written simply: “Dear mom, send money. I think I’m going to be shot for meat.” On the day Sonic Youth are curating, however… well. Here’s the ‘description’ given for the band Fuck:

“No one knows for sure what makes any man want to argue. Particularly when the potential for flower blooming goo-drops are manifest. Soft or hard and consensual.”

Thus was born our chalet’s catch-phrase on the Saturday when trying to get a clue as to what a band would sound like: “Thanks, Thurston.”

So anyway, Saturday. Having initially been scared off by Carla Bozulich’s introduction (because it occurs to me that scratching drumsticks against cymbals might be all they do – I’m obviously having a flash-forward to Jackie-O Motherfucker tomorrow), I go to see what Fuck are like and they’re an inoffensive guitar band, and I can’t help but imagine them sitting around thinking “hmm, we’re kinda bland, how are we gonna draw attention to ourselves? – wait, how about a rude name!?” Apparently after I leave they punctuate the music with a magic show, so I guess they have more than one gimmick up their sleeves, but still: nothing to write home about.

So I come back downstairs and lo and behold, Carla Bozulich / Nels Cline are pretty fucking great after all. The songs are sometimes reminiscent of PJ Harvey, sometimes the Dirty Three, and these are of course very good things. Although the name of Carla Bozulich’s former band the Geraldine Fibbers is familiar to me, I’d never heard any of their songs to my knowledge – a few were included in today’s set (pretty sure ‘Butch’ was one of them) – good stuff. Best of all though is a medley of what I later learn are Willie Nelson songs (Bozulich has covered an entire Willie Nelson album, on which Nelson himself sings). ‘Time Of The Preacher’ / ‘Red Headed Stranger’ is brilliant, blood-in-the-sand stuff – it sounds like the theme song to the best Western never yet made (forget Bon Jovi, and try not to think of Garth Ennis either for that matter). Carla sings with particular relish the line: “You can’t hang a man / For killing a woman / Who’s trying to steal his horse.”

Carla & co end with a cover of Marianne Faithful’s ‘Times Square’, which can only be described using the critically clichéd term spellbinding. It’s real blues, alcohol poured over heartache, and may just trump Cat Power for most tear-jerking moment of the weekend. At the end of the show we learn that the guy playing stand-up bass (I didn’t catch his name) only met the rest of the band five days ago, which is pretty incredible given how well they played together. Yeah, so anyway: Carla Bozulich = a star. Well dressed, too. Looks uncannily like someone I know.

My hangover doesn’t kick in until slightly later in the day, which means I’m feeling pretty fragile when I walk into the upstairs venue to see Black Dice. So I walk straight out again on hearing that they make deliberately irritating noise. Tense, nervous headache? If you don’t have one already, these boys will fix that. Silly of me to bother really: everything I’ve read about Black Dice suggested that they’re not my cup of tea, but the DFA connection had me hoping that maybe there would be some rhythm or tune or point to it all… No such luck.

"Konichiwa. We are oh-oh-eye-oh-oh."

And we're back on track.

00I00 just might be the most joycore band of the weekend. I totally get the Yoshimi thing now, too (fuck, I didn't know she played in Free Kitten - I'm embarrassed now). At times this year's ATP seemed to be dominated by drummers, I'm telling you. I think it's thanks mainly to the percussion that 00I00 have this whole Slits thing going on, which as everybody knows is never a bad thing. But maybe the best thing about 'em is the way they can switch up effortlessly between pure sugary pop rushes and atmospheric, tinkly soundscape stuff which I guess must be psychedelia, but don't ask me about psychedelia, I don't do enough drugs these days and never really did the right ones. Apparently they started life as a fictional band - how cool is that?

Erase Errata remain a band I really like in theory, a band I really want to like? But I can never quite get into them, on record or, as it turns out, live. Especially after the breezy, thrilling 00I00, Erase Errata just seem a little bit too... well, rocky. In the sense that is almost always lost on me, which is to say without much in the way of decent TUNES... Um, I feel really bad about writing that. Sorry.

I should mention that walking through the downstairs venue at some point later I see the funniest sight of the weekend: I'm not sure if it's Charalambides or Wolf Eyes, but the lead singer wears a black t-shirt with a skeleton design, and stands on stage cradling himself in his arms, hair hiding his face, rocking side to side like he?s gone catatonic, while the band makes feedback noise. Rock on? No. Dried smelly wankstains.

Unlike Riz, I reckon Le Tigre have - amazingly - got even better since I saw them play in London. Sexier, more disco, more rock, more hip-hop, more joycore... They begin with a cover of 'I'm So Excited' that is so incredibly fucking good words will not do it justice - suffice to say they totally make that song their own and if this cover isn't on the new album, then they're insane. And why deny it: Kathleen Hanna is incredibly hott, especially during this song. It's not just the outfit or the, ahem, thickness, it's the confidence and the charisma too... Although JD Samson is increasingly becoming the star of this band, definitely the one who makes the hip hop element work. JD really shines on a new song that is introduced as being "about butch lesbians" and features a great chorus which goes something like "They call it binding, and we call it VISIBILITY... They call it way too rowdy, we call it FINALLY FREE."

Note: Le Tigre navigate their way through the minefield of where their politics intersect with the politics of race, sexuality and trans issues with their usual careering ambiguity (not sure I have room to explain this in detail here, but just for starters, I'm not sure that everyone pictured in the cartoon which accompanies the aforementioned new song identifies as "butch lesbian", and it's not like they don't have previous for pissing off trans people). But just for tonight, that seems like just an inevitable side-effect of all the great political bands (Public Enemy, early Manic Street Preachers - DON'T LAUGH OR I BREAK FACE) - they're always messy, always fucking up, always letting off their guns righteous anger and angry idealism in crowded rooms full of innocent people, that kind of thing.

While we're talking about the political content, Le Tigre score more points for keeping the between-song banter short and sweet too, tonight - one of the few things I didn't like about the Le Tigre gig I saw previously was the tendency of the space between songs to be filled with slightly over-long, over-hectoring speeches - not because I disagree with the politics but because it's all there in the songs already and really, should a gig be the place to remind people who are in all likelihood already trying to do their bit that they can always be doing more? Maybe it is, I dunno, but they skipped any of that this time and kept it more of a celebration, and it was awesome.

Some songs they played: 'Shred A' (works so much better live than on record), 'Let's Run' (God I love that "we get our grades from Professor You" line, and Hanna really plays it up, pointing at the crowd, "you, and you, and you..."), 'The The Empty' (cue audience call and response: "OH... BABY!"), 'Mediocrity Rules', 'FYR', 'Well Well Well' (the hotness...), 'What's Yr Take On Cassavetes?', 'Hot Topic' (I?m pretty sure they've rearranged the slideshow, just to make it more fun for the "name the records / books / people" geeks), 'Yr Critique', 'Deceptacon' (still sounds like the best song ever), 'Keep On Livin'... I didn't even miss 'Les And Ray' too much.

So as you can imagine, at this point in the weekend I?m pretty much thinking that nothing else will live up to Le Tigre's show this weekend, and for a while, nothing else does.

Sonic Youth are okay. They're just okay, y'know? And people who like them tend to think that they're one of the best bands in the world, and I honestly wanted to experience an epiphany tonight and leave ATP as a convert, a Sonic Youth fan come lately. But it didn't happen. They're not in any sense bad. They're just okay.

Then to the pub where Arab Strap are still drinking, then back to the chalet to listen to Johnny Cash and discuss the loss of the Man In Black and also Joe Strummer.