The Entroporium

After starting the evening at a house with a wonderfully bizarre “Grandpa’s Lounge” pouring from an abundant supply of homemade absinthe (DANGER! DANGER!), my posse turned up at The Fillmore for the M.I.A / LCD Soundsystem indie festival. But disaster struck right away — we thought there was an opener, but there wasn’t… and we wound up missing M.I.A!!! So much for being on the forefront of today’s music. I’m too busy hangin’ out in Grandpa’s Undergound Clown Lounge to bring you the lowdown on today’s hottest artists.

So anyway, on to LCD Soundsystem. The band was sharp, tight and surprisingly loud. Singer and prime mover James Murphy shook a mean tambourine and provided all the charisma for a band that otherwise had pretty much none. LCD tore through versions of all their greatest hits (all four of them), playing them almost exactly as recorded (but louder). Everybody had a lot of fun, and a surprising number of people were tripping. There’s a whole sociologicial coolhunting exercise that I could do on that, but I think I’ll leave that for someone from Generation Z (or whatever y’all are calling yourselves these days) to suss out that hot potato. Help educate an old Jetta-driving, iPod-wearing indie-yuppie!

OK, but let’s get down to the nitty gritty here. This is a four-year old band. They were fun. The hit songs rule. But for all the time this band has been together, it was barely able to present an hour of its own material, filling out the show with three lengthy covers. Incredibly cool covers, yes; the redoubtable Mr. Murphy can be counted on for that; and for the record they were “Slowdive” by Siouxsie, “Jump Into The Fire” by Harry Nilsson and some Carl Craig song (does it matter which?) that didn’t work all that well.

The covers were a dead giveaway — I’ve got lots of inspiration, but not too many songs, here’s my inspiration, it rules, it’s hepper-than-thous. On the other hand, if you were expecting some obscure hepper-than-thou post-punk touch stone like a Lizzy Mercier-Descloux cover or somesuch, you were instead faced with the surprising choice of a rowdy funk-up by the man who put in the lime in the coconut or in the Coke-you-nut or wherever that lime was going. This cover was actually & exceptionally revealing of LCD’s DNA, showing that the post-punk funk can be traced back to a 1972 track by the “drunk guy who used to hang out with John Lennon.” (Harry was much better than that, but that’s what he’s stuck with.)

In sum, the show rocked, everybody had a good time, but by the time I got home I’d forgotten all about it. Or maybe I couldn’t hear it over the absinthe?

[Soundtrack]
Harry Nilsson – Jump Into The Fire.mp3
LCD Soundsystem – Beat Connection (from Epitonic)
Stream LCD Soundsystem’s debut album in its entirety

I’m pleased to report that Gang Of Four was worth the 25-year wait. The band sounded and looked fantastic, playing most of the first two classic albums in a set lasting about 90 minutes. Jon King’s voice has only gotten stronger with age and Andy Gill’s furious guitar playing is still completely dead-on.

In my mind, Gill is the keystone of the band’s sound. Everything always seems to be on the verge of completely shaking apart and entering some realm of madness, but somehow he always keeps it just barely under control. To this day, the feedback opening of “Anthrax” still makes me queasy, which is just so right for the song. And then when they break into the funk-march, the dialogue between the two singers… it’s as good as it gets. High Art.

Even the stagecraft is impressive. Three mikes are set up onstage and each of the three frontmen run between them, switching places constantly. It’s energetic, it works well with the music and it gives King built-in opportunities to work the whole room like a stadium band without being ostentatiously so. Inclusiveness was always at the center of Go4′s message, and the stage set-up drives it home.

The songs, too, have improved with age. The antagonists of songs like “At Home He Feels Like A Tourist” and “Paralyzed” are kept at a somewhat ironic distance on the original albums, partly because of the band’s political commentary, but because the band itself was clearly NOT the characters they were talking about: ordinary people ground up by the system, looking for hope & meaning in Capitalist pursuits. These same songs coming from older, more wizened faces become more poignant, because now there’s the possibility that they themselves have had to face down these frustrations & demons. (It could be argued that by re-uniting 25 years on, they may have in fact given in. I guess time will tell whether this tour turns out to be a cynical cash-in.)

Not everything worked perfectly. King could be seen yelling “Slower!” o bassist Dave Allen during “What We All Want.” And “I Love A Man In A Uniform” just doesn’t work without a woman to chide King’s character for his hubris. We didn’t even realize until we got outside that “If I Keep Could Keep It For Myself” and “Outside The Trains Don’t Run On Time” got skipped.

At any rate, big thumbs up. Don’t miss this when they come to your town.

And now in the interest of equal time for dissent, here’s my friend, Darin:

I was actually pretty disappointed about the show quality. You can make the case that their music is supposed to be a little sloppy but the sound and the playing were way messier than the albums. At times they had the enthusiasm but I think they should have practiced more before they toured. Their playing didn’t do justice to those songs…

I’ve put up a couple of Gang Of Four songs in the past couple of months, so here’s a slight departure: a cut from the Andy Gill-produced Futureheads album. Curiously, Futureheads and Gang Of Four sit next to each other alphabetically in my ipod.

[Soundtrack]
Futureheads – First Day.mp3

The straight dope on the reunion from Andy Gill
Gang Of Four tour dates