Murder City Devils CBGB (July 28) Ever since I was a young kid I've dreamed about seeing a show at CBGB. It must be the bar's grandiose punk history, or the fact that all the bands I've ever loved have played on its dirty stage at one time or another. Ironically, since moving to New York a year ago, I had yet to see a band on the CB's schedule that I wanted to see?until Seattle's Murder City Devils came to town. When I got to the club, I took a long look at the punk rock palace, and then filed in with the hundreds of other fans. I had entered a flea market that was selling all the things I liked best: beer, good music, interesting people. I couldn't get enough of this place, and the night had only begun.
The rest of the show was one punk rock anthem after the other. Every time the Devils started a new song I was sucked into their world of truck stops and bar fights. The Devils have a distinct rawness. For a minute there I felt like I had been transported to a Stooges show. I left covered in sweat and happy as hell that I finally made the trek to 315 Bowery.
D. Stortion
Ninetynine The Lift, Brighton (July 26) It's rare indeed that one sees a xylophone played with such passion. Cameron Potts takes giant windmill sweeps at the instrument as he steps to the front, his passion only met by Laura MacFarlane's toxic vocals and the way she hammers away at the organ. He's like Jerry Lee Lewis reinvented with a mop haircut and riot grrrl leanings, singing out tales of how he lost his watch that spelt out Yasir Arafat in Arabic with a falsetto ferocity that stuns virtually everyone present. A Bontempi beat sounds out from MacFarlane's organ at the start of "Cois Il Hamdu Lilah" like a cross between James Brown's "Popcorn," Pac-Man and Flowered Up's revolutionary early-90s dance-rock standard, "Weekender." Potts' vocals become even more garbled and extreme. It's the highlight of the evening, almost?especially when the twin female vocals, all proud and focused, start to intertwine with Potts' lead. "This is a song about waking up next to someone you love and saying 'You're beautiful,'" remarks one of the band's token males. "Basically, this is a song of love."
Some teenage retard standing next to me remarks too loudly, "They sound like the Doors." Yeah, and Annette Peacock was a member of ELP. What's your point, precisely? That there's a keyboard onstage?
Potts retreats back to his usual spot behind the drums, swapping instruments with co-frontperson Michelle Mansford. "Mesopotamia" starts, sounding like a wired reading of Quasi's romanticism crossed with the angered politics of mid-80s British female duo Toxic Shock. Listening to Ninetynine playing songs from their album 180° with all their turbulence and childlike xylophone chimes, it seems that life is one long series of disappointments and betrayals, tempered only by the kindness of friends. You think that silence doesn't come at a price? How perspicuous of you! The fact that the Melbourne-based Ninetynine can sound so alive and brutally aware after three albums and scarce praise is little short than miraculous. "This is a song about catching a train in Dunedin," Potts remarks, sitting down once more. "It's called 'Walking Alone.'" Yeah, we've all been there, mate, caught in cities on the edge of the world where it rains and rains, and there's no one to catch you if you fall. Don't ever stop moving.
Everett True
Sleater-Kinney The Pavilion Theatre, Brighton (July 30) A man next to me (younger than me) starts talking about how being here is the equivalent of seeing the MC5 in the 60s. I want to know how he knows. He says he has an MC5 live album. I want to know how he thinks he can compare a visceral, recorded experience with this living, throbbing entity in front of us?the solitary boys pogoing, rooted to the spot during "All Hands on the Bad One," the girls clustered together, fierce and unsettling in their schoolgirl tights. He says that he first heard the MC5 when he was 12 and it made his whole world explode in a riot of color and flame. He never worked again (or so he claims). I wonder if perhaps my friend has been reading too many remaindered Greil Marcus books that he can compare something so obviously male with something so resolutely female. Something so clearly belonging to a past, parochial view of rock history with something that is so wonderfully happening right in front of us. I wonder if the MC5 ever had personal stylists, like Sleater-Kinney, whether they paid as much attention to image and harmony.
"There are little pockets of people dancing," smiled singer Carrie Brownstein from the stage, in between kicking her leg out just so. "And we encourage that energy to spread. There are a lot of new dance moves out there still waiting to be discovered."
Much has been made of Sleater-Kinney's lyrics. This I do not understand. Music should never be reduced to its component parts?certainly not rock 'n' roll. Are we talking dissertations on economics here or living, breathing women? Rock music in a live context always gets reduced to a series of flamboyant, direct slogans and gestures. It probably matters deeply to Corin Tucker that the lyrics like "Now who would have believed this riot grrrl's a cynic/But they took our ideas to their marketing stars" (from "#1 Must-Have") take on a bittersweet poignancy each time she sings them. (They also help infuse her almost-frantic, harmonious quaver with even more passion.) To us out front, however, all we care is whether the guitars are gelling as stridently and truly as the two voices, whether Janet Weiss' drum sound is as motivational as ever.
To reduce Sleater-Kinney to their lyrical content seems to me a deeply patronizing, almost offensive way of viewing their music. Boy bands wouldn't attract such scrutiny, and perhaps one could argue that they rarely merit it. But Sleater-Kinney are a full-on rock band (as my chum's comparison to the MC5 shows).
"Go, go, go," an enthusiast shouts from the crowd during one of the rare breaks. "Thanks," replies Corin. "You make it sound like we're running a race or something," adds Carrie. Tonight is awesome, a reaffirmation. Love song "Leave You Behind," with its intricate, delicate harmonies, makes me shiver as hard as anyone this side of Portland's Quasi or Cadallaca. "The Professional" makes me want to smash my stupid head against the wall of punk rock until the blood trickles down my cheeks. As befits the last show on any tour (this is Sleater-Kinney's final European date) the band doesn't want to stop playing and the audience doesn't want them to, either. Carrie smiles like there's no reason not to, guitars wail and rise, vocals soar and crack facades that little more. Just another evening with the most wonderful rock 'n' roll band in the world, then.
Everett True