F-Yeah Tour: Sanity Plea

June 20, 2008 by Peter  Send to a Friend

in true team work fashion: all photos are the Baltimore show via Josh Sisk and all words are from the DC show. Representing and stuff.

The F-Yeah tour is a rolling thunder of positive happy-thought energy celebrating the Punk-Pop Nu Day-Glo lifestyle through DIY Hairstyling, Independent Publishing, Political Gesturing and Dressing like a Bike Messenger.

Oh yeah and music: some of the foremost examples of the funnest electropunk around touring together in an extravaganza of sweaty druggy broken joy. As Matt of Matt and Kim put it in between songs last night, “We’re all packed into a converted school bus, stealing grease from restaurants late at night for fuel, and having the best time because we all just love playing shows and being on tour!” Yay!

It’s a fantastic sentiment—literally the fantasy of many a teenage weirdo, not to be famous or even particularly good, but just to move, get out, get over, get on a bus and travel around and have stupid experiences and meet interesting people and not be forced to do anything but wake up and rock out. So good for them, and I’d hate to piss in anyone’s Pabst, but there is a specter haunting the Happy Hunting Grounds, and its name is Pretension. So I’ll just try to make a quick statement and then move on to praising everyone’s musical performance, which across the board was fantastic.

Musicians: please play on the stage. Yeah, it’s great to be all up in the crowd’s face. Yeah I know that house parties are the best shows and it feels weird to play above everyone’s heads. I totally see that the intention is to bring the party to us, to create a sense of belonging, break the barriers between the performer and audience, to say, “We are not special, we are like you, let’s work together to make this the most fun unique experience possible–totally unlike a boring old rock show c’mon you guys let’s gogogo!”

But.

It doesn’t do any of that. It just makes it hard for anyone who isn’t immediately around the band to see shit. I sincerely think that the DeathSet is one of the best bands alive today but it was just frustrating watching the back of some dude’s head bobbing up and down instead of the musicians playing their amazing music. So I decided to see what it was like for the kids in the front. Of course nobody wanted to give up their precious viewing territory so I literally had to shove my way up to the stage, flinging awkward teenagers aside like my sister’s Barbies when they encroached on my GI Joe battlefield. Once I got to the front it was awesome. The band was pumped and screaming and sharing the mic with the crowd and when they played Op Ivy it was like the perfect connection of punk universes—Berkley in the 90s reaching out its gutterpunk fingers to the new millennium and asking for change across generations—but I had to be immensely rude to get that experience, and only 25 people possibly could have shared it.

You want to hear what playing on the floor in a club with a big fine beautiful stage really says to an audience? “We are too good for trite rock-and-roll clichés. We would rather play to the people that Get It than reach out to those who may not understand yet. We are pretending that we are still playing in a basement even though we’re popular enough to be in this place with a great sound system and lights and a backstage and working toilets. We would rather look the part of being ‘one with the crowd’ than give the maximum number of fans the maximum exposure to the music they all paid to see.” One of the bands even insisted that the audience move around in a circle when they set up on the floor… “Like in the pictures?” some asshole in the back quipped. “I don’t see why it’s a joke!” said the band guy. Forced simplicity isn’t any more inclusive than the bad hardcore rituals that these bands are rebelling against—it’s just elitism turned upside down.

Enough bitching. Some music reviews, why not?

The Mannequin Men started out the night controversially elevated and played pretty great sarcastic straight-ahead rawk and role. They had a song called “Judy” in which the chorus was “Judy! Judy! What’s your name?” and a song called “Do You Want A Massage?” which managed to be twice as sleazy as the title promised, but in a good way.

Team Robespierre made one of my favorite albums of this year and seemed credible live, if a bit flat. It’s hard to go nuts at 8:30 PM, even if your music is flailing 3 chord punk with keyboard accents and a lead singer who looks like he was bought out of the Brooklyn Catalogue Summer Collection. Their energy was palpable but not particularly infectious.

Then Monotonix. This is the perennial exception to the Don’t Set Up On The Floor rule—when a band is so good they can use every fucking single inch of space as a theater. I hesitate even to begin to describe how mindblowing these dudes were, and how perfect it was for them to be off stage. I suspect nothing could have kept them out of the audience anyway, but starting out right in a big pile of onlookers made the whole thing seem like one of those insane street performances you see in Venice or somewhere, crowd members forced to participate in the madness.

I hope Josh’s pictures do this justice (they do) but let me give you a quick synopsis of some of the feats of wonder and magic this trio performed (note: all while playing the tightest set of MC5ish brutal psychobilly I have heard since Pussy Galore split up). The lead singer (a necromancer I’m sure) kept moving the drums while the drummer was playing them, whilst he blithely kept following along beating on them and grinning under his handlebar ’stache. Once ensconced in a new area the singer would bleat an incantation into the echochamber and sneak around inviting people to pour their drinks into his shoe, which he would then ingest, or, more disgustingly, spew into the air over everyone. Once he moved the band (and the following crowd) directly in front of bar and dumped the entire water cooler on the drummer in the middle of the song. Once he stole my friend’s drink like a freaky finger-twiddling Gollum and did god-knows-what with it, possibly putting it down the front of his absurdly tight jeans like he did with his beer and BO soaked shirt. He stood on both bars and howled at us. The guitarist performed an immaculate solo with a full trash can over his upper body. Some of these actions may have been hallucinations.

As the finale, he stole the bass drum and disappeared into the crowd at the climax of a song. The guitar kept soloing squealing high registers of feedback from the amp on the stage across the room, the player standing on a stool twenty yards away. The drummer kept the beat going on the snare and the crash symbol.

Then the singer popped up and grabbed the snare, luring the drummer, who started up a military roll, into the scrum of people around the bass drum. A moment or two passed where we couldn’t see anything…then suddenly the drummer rose into the air, sitting cross-legged on his bass drum, carried aloft by a bunch of strangers, one of who hoisted his snare so he could rattle on that some more. More helpful kids fetched the hi-hat and crash and held those up as well…the crash swayed back in forth as it ascended, wavering, until just as it was close enough for him to beat on it, just as the tip of the stick touched the metal, the singer leaped onto our shoulders and started singing and guitar roared back into the main riff of the song and bang bang bang shriek end of show. I told my girlfriend that story when I got home and I’m pretty sure she didn’t believe me. It’s hard to believe it was real myself. I’ll never miss another one of these guys’ concerts, I don’t care if they play in a stadium or at a bar mitzvah, I bet they test the limits of believability every time.

The DeathSet I already talked about. They played sick good and have two drummers now rather than none. I don’t know for sure whether they originated this kind of music, poppy keyboard punk mixed with club music re-mixed with screamo, but they are definitely deserve to be known as the innovators and will probably be on MTV within a year popping bottles with Soulja Boy and wearing platinum fronts. God Bless ‘em. Someone broke a bottle of paint on the floor in the jumping and in the spirit of Unity I rolled around in it and turned my ass blue. Thanks fellas!

I didn’t know much about Matt and Kim, but I was ready to love them right off the bat since they played onstage. Almost before the first note a real dance party broke out. Kim plays the drums really very hard and the old mic they used to broadcast her bashing made the snare sound like a bucket (it may have been a bucket actually I still couldn’t see that well because now I was dancing like a doofus and singing along even though I had never heard any of the songs before). All the jams were about the same and Matt’s voice is a little affected but who cares? There was nothing phony about their positivism, they were just having a great time and everything about their sound expressed it. I decided at some point that the keyboard tone Matt uses is exactly like a particular Daft Punk song, but now I can’t remember which one. I was yelling to someone “LIKE DAFT PUNK! WITH MARKY RAMONE ON DRUMS! PUNK-DAFT!” when they finished the last song, all too quickly.

Then Dan Deacon did his thing and I was back to being disgruntled with the set-up. His music is even less justifiable to play in a crowd because there’s only one of him, making it even harder to enjoy. His music is great, weird bloopy ADHD disco garage, it’s basically perfect and refreshing and hopeful. But before he started he had everyone raise their arms in the air and then crouch on the ground and kiss their fingers and put them on someone else’s mouth in a kind of yoga twister surrogate makeout orgy, which I totally would have participated in except I took the opportunity to stand up and check out what he looked like and what kinda instruments he was playing. I was standing in a crowd of crouching writhing hipsters, who were looking up at me suddenly, laughing, pointing at me for not playing along. So maybe it’s just sour grapes this diatribe. I want to be part of the in-crowd too, you guys. I don’t want to be a pinhead no more! Please play music on the stage so I can be part of your scene. Thanks, I love you. Signed, A Freak.

 Send to a Friend