https://www.high-endrolex.com/18

Live Review: Electric Wizard and Satan’s Satyrs in Boston, 04.03.15

Posted in Reviews on April 7th, 2015 by JJ Koczan

Electric Wizard (Photo by JJ Koczan)

Knowing that on a Friday night the Royale would have its dance club going by 10PM, I made sure I was at the venue early. Doors were slated for six for Electric Wizard and Satan’s Satyrs, and the venue would be cleared out before the dance party began. I neither begrudge Royale its double-booking — gotta make money, and the more the merrier as long as you can get away with it — nor mind an early night. While I’ve shown up late for shows in the past elsewhere and been pissed off missing this or that band, so long as the clientele are aware of the situation, an early end to the show isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One might go out to the bar with a group of friends and talk about how much the show kicked ass, feeling good and energetic after watching someone kill it. In my case, I went home and sat with the dog afterwards, but you know, you could go out and do something. If you’re in your 20s, maybe.

Satan's Satyrs (Photo by JJ Koczan)Two bands on the bill: Satan’s Satyrs and Electric Wizard. I was maybe fifth on line, which was enough to get me in and allow me to get a spot up front when the doors actually opened, closer to 6:30 than not. Satan’s Satyrs were slated to start at that point, but they didn’t actually go for another half an hour, the Virginia three-piece sharing bassist Clayton Burgess with the headliner. Satan’s Satyrs have been kicking around for the last six years, proffering ’70s boogie and doomly atmospherics — disciples conceptually, if not exactly sonically, of Electric Wizard — and they have two records out in 2012’s Wild Beyond Belief! and last year’s Die Screaming, as well as a handful of other EPs and live releases. Their third record is in the can, having been tracked in February, but the impression they give on stage, other than guitarist Jarrett Nettnin and drummer Stephen Fairfield winning any contest for big hair that might be going on, is of a young band.

The energy in their delivery, their presence on stage, the underlying vigor with which they present their material — it’s something they’ve managed to hold onto despite having a decent amount of experience under their collective belt at this point. They toured Europe last year, played Roadburn twice, and I don’t think that was their first time Satan's Satyrs (Photo by JJ Koczan)on the road. The kicker is that in addition to being young, they’re also ridiculously tight. So you’ve got Burgess spinning around on stage, Fairfield bounding around his teased-out coiffure, and Nettnin hitting Iommi poses for the leads, but they’re nailing it. All of it, really. Cuts like “Instruments of Hellfire” and “Lucifer Lives” from Die Screaming were boogie doom ragers, and they played a new song that, had it not been announced as such, it would’ve been easy to imagine they’d been kicking around for a couple years. It was my first time seeing them and they tore it up. Yeah, people were there to see Electric Wizard and it was Electric Wizard‘s show, but I didn’t hear one complaint while Satan’s Satyrs were on stage.

It felt like a long changeover, though I’ll allow that could’ve just been anticipation. I’ve seen Electric Wizard before, when guitarist/vocalist Jus Oborn curated a day at Roadburn 2013 (review here), but in the two years since, he and guitarist Liz Buckingham (ex-13, for New York types) Electric Wizard (Photo by JJ Koczan)have totally swapped out the rhythm section, bringing in Burgess on bass and drummer Simon Poole, and well, this was their first US tour since reactivating in 2007 — and several years before that — so it felt a bit like an event even before they took the stage. They did so preceded by burning enough incense to give me raised-Catholic flashbacks, which were perfect for Good Friday, and by bringing the lights all the way down for the intro “Crypt of Drugula.” A one-two punch of “Witchcult Today” from the 2007 landmark of the same name and “Black Mass” from 2010’s Black Masses (review here) followed and reaffirmed why we were all there: to worship. The riff, the nod, the horror. A crowd of scumbags and normal heads, hipsters, hippies and crust kids, headbangers and stoners, all of us drawn in by the eerie power and undeniable hooks of Electric Wizard, as beautiful as it is deranged. Altered movie clips playing behind them, the foursome wasted little time that could’ve otherwise been dedicated to Heavy, and they had plenty of that to go around.

Sound at the Royale can vary pretty widely depending on where you stand. It’s a club, remember. Electric Wizard (Photo by JJ Koczan)After “Satanic Rites of Drugula” came “Dopethrone” and I started make my way back from up front by the stage, found I could hear Oborn‘s vocals better and more of a balance between the guitars and bass. Earplugs pulled halfway out, the wash of noise was near-physical, a push that seemed to have presence. “Dopethrone,” taken from the 2000 album of the same name — 15 years later, its influence continues to spread — got a huge response, and while I’ll never understand people moshing to doom riffs, sometimes you just have to shrug your shoulders. Nothing to be done about it anyway. In back the audio was clear and I could see the screen behind them better, the cover of Dopethrone projected interlaced with ’60s/’70s horror boobage and other sundry whatnots, motorcycles and the like. Come My Fanatics (1997) opener “Return Trip” followed “Dopethrone” and only after that, more than halfway through the set, did they touch on the new album, 2014’s Time to Die (review here), with “Incense for the Damned” and “Time to Die” one into the next. Easy to get lost in that murk of riffage, but that’s the point. A quick second to catch breath later, and “The Chosen Few” from Witchcult Today once more had the room in a trance, the line “legalize drugs and murder” — also the name of an EP the band put out with a track on it based around the line copped from “The Chosen Few” — getting an extra-loud chant from the crowd.

Electric Wizard (Photo by JJ Koczan)That just left “Funeralopolis” to close out, and when the undulating Dopethrone track hit, there was little doubt that it was the culmination of Electric Wizard‘s set. The insistent riffs of the song’s early going were the night’s most engrossing nod, and the later tempo burst was met with a suitable audience response as it thrust forward into its own destruction into shouts, and noise, the whole set seeming to come off the rails with Oborn shouting out misanthropics as Buckingham and Burgess added to the mound of feedback and Poole attacked his drums to further the sense of chaos. One couldn’t ask a more fitting end to an Electric Wizard show than to have the whole thing dissolve right there on stage. No encore, nothing left to say, they took off. About a minute’s tease later, the lights came up and the early goers at the Royale shuffled their way downstairs and out of the building. I was home before 10:30.

More pics after the jump. Thanks for reading.

Read more »

Tags: , , , , ,

Live Review: Swans in Boston, 05.17.14

Posted in Reviews on May 19th, 2014 by JJ Koczan

Outside Boston’s Royale, elaborately made-up young women in expensive-looking dresses stood waiting in a line while bearded-types smoked cigarettes on the sidewalk. Royale, which hosted Swans on Saturday, is a nightclub in what I guess was Boston’s theatre district. There are at least two rooms in the place, maybe more. Swans played upstairs, a larger hall, good lights, good sound, an elevated area in front of the stage that it took me a second to realize would become a dance floor as soon as 10PM hit and the weirdo contingent shuffled out to let the clubbers lang — if that can be a verb for what one does when clubbing at the risk of betraying my inexperience in this regard.

And indeed, 10PM. The show was even earlier than I anticipated it being from the Royale‘s website saying doors at 6, show at 7. In the rare and appreciated company of The Patient Mrs., I rolled in at about 6:50 and found Jenny Hval on stage, maybe halfway through her set. Who knew? A lot of people, judging by the crowd. I didn’t find out about that whole “out by 10” thing until I was already there, and needless to say the evening made more sense afterwards. For Hval‘s part, the Oslo native and her accompanying duo of Håvard Volden and Kyrre Laastad ran a line between moody alternative pop and more experimental indie ambience. Probably not something I’d have gone to see were Swans not coming on next, but creative and well-presented from the few songs I saw. I wouldn’t have minded showing up earlier if I’d been so lucky.

Hval and Co. played in front of Swans‘ elaborate setup — a pedal steel was brought out later for Christoph Hahn, but drummer Phil Puleo and multi-instrumentalist Thor Harris already had their stations ready, and amps for guitarist/vocalist Michael Gira, bassist Chris Pravdica and guitarist Norman Westberg were prepositioned — and that made the changeover shorter than it probably would’ve been otherwise, but still, barely being 8PM, it hardly felt like they needed to rush. Supporting their newly-released third full-length since reactivating, To be Kind (review here), the Swans tour was newly begun. A night in D.C., a night in Philly, then Boston, followed by Manhattan and Brooklyn as a warmup for a longer stretch through the UK taking them through the rest of May into early June, with a longer summer US tour to follow mid-June into July.

My expectations for Swans were high. I remembered well the teeth-vibrating heaviness they conjured at Roadburn 2011, playing material from 2010’s don’t-call-it-a-comeback My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky (review here) as well as some early versions of songs like “The Apostate,” which would appear on 2012’s The Seer. “The Apostate” was aired at the Royale as well, making it the oldest song in a set that included two-point-five from To be Kind in “Oxygen,” “A Little God in My Hands,” and a mutated take on “Bring the Sun,” which appears as the first half of the 34-minute “Bring the Sun/Toussaint l’Ouverture” on the record, and two new songs, “Frankie M.” and “Don’t Go.”

The impulse with Swans since they started playing again — Gira transitioning from Angels of Light back to Swans as he shifted in 1997 from Swans to Angels of Light — has been to think of how apocalyptic they sound, to delve into drone-as-shattering-consciousness hyperbole. I’ve done it too more than once. I think it says much more about who these people are as artists and the deep creative need at work that, the same week their new album is released, they’re already remolding the material and playing two brand new, yet-unrecorded cuts, one of them opening the set. I don’t know whether “Frankie M.” or “Don’t Go” will wind up on the next Swans studio outing, and if they do, I’d expect they’ll be retooled in one manner or another, but just the fact that that’s how Swans go about their business where they could just as easily be plugging the t-shirts and vinyl at the merch booth said a lot about their priorities and how passion-driven they are.

Most likely, two nights into what will be several months of shows, Swans would tell you the show will get tighter. Gira hinted at same in mentioning how the stuff was all pretty new after “Don’t Go,” before he put his guitar down and danced like the mad conductor Jim Morrison wanted to be when he grew up for the bulk of “The Apostate,” directing Harris to hit this or that effect, maybe go for the flute, the horn, the gong, the chimes, or any number of other of the instruments he had in the little box constructed around him next to Puleo‘s also-expansive drum kit, or matching eyes with Pravdica in timing out measures for the insistent slams that start “Bring the Sun.” This lineup of Swans, inexperienced though they may be with bringing To be Kind to the stage, have been playing together for a few years now and it shows. Gira‘s signals, whether it’s a reeled-back leg kick to time a hit for the whole band or a subtle eye-glance to one player or another around him, are well read, and the fullness of sound Swans craft when they choose to do so is as consuming as their reputation would have you believe.

“A Little God in My Hands” was the second song played, behind “Frankie M.,” and offered an early bit of accessibility for what would soon turn into an amorphous spread of builds and crashes. “Oxygen” has form, and so does “The Apostate,” but live the bleed from one piece into the next was only distinct when it came to a silent finish, and while “The Apostate” seemed when they were done like that was it, “Bring the Sun” justified its place as the finale by giving an interpretation of drone-as-ritual that few I’ve seen live could rival. Whatever that track is going to turn into by the time Swans are done doing shows for To be Kind remains to be seen, but hopefully some recording of it surfaces somewhere along the line. It was distinct from the album version not just for dropping the “Toussaint l’Ouverture” half, but also it seemed to be finding its way as it went on — not a jam exactly, but live exploration unfolding in real-time swells of volume and tension. A solid 90 minutes had passed when they were done. I was surprised to look at my watch and see it was 20 after nine.

Downstairs at Royale, thudding dance beats pumped through the wall and as the art students, aged-out goths, metal intellectuals, kids who Pitchfork told to be there, stoners, girlfriends, industrial heads and others poured out of the front door, I spied some sidelong glances from those waiting to go upstairs and… well, whatever it was. So be it. If palpable, willful deviance from the norm was to be the vibe given off, then Swans made perfect figureheads for the evening.

Some more photos after the jump. Thanks for reading.

Read more »

Tags: , , , , , , ,