“Dismantle this morning” – lots of show reviews & …

“Dismantle this morning” – lots of show reviews & a Bookish remix

“Me and my anger sit folding a paper bird,
Letting the curtains turn to beating wind
Wish I had a socket-set to dismantle this morning
And just one pair of clean socks
And a photo of you” (Weakerthans)

Lately I’ve spend so much time putting up shows and going to shows that I didn’t get to write much but this longish entry will make more than good for it. I wonder if my love for small concerts will ever go away. At the moment I seem to enjoy it more than ever. Watching bands and meeting people you like and share the experience of music in an intimate atmosphere makes me feel like home. Especially now in this season of festivals with masses of people those small shows appear even more precious and intense.

After a break that felt pretty long I turned to making music again. That’s quite satisfying too.
And I made a remix of SIMON BOOKISH’s great “Portrait Of The Artist As A Fountain”. Nothing super exciting but a bit of a rework to make it more danceable. You can download it from here: “Portrait Of The Artist As A Moutain” (eve massacre whisky spring remix) (rightclick on the picture and save). If you like it, go buy his album ‘Unfair/Funfair’ that is out now!

Here are some stories about the shows I’ve been to, chronologically backwards. I’ve also put up some pictures at www.evemassacre.de

BATTLESHIP + RACEBANNON
Wuerzburg / Immerhin XyeahX 28.05.2006
I watched Jarhead that afternoon which I don’t recommend. I guess the idea could be realised into a good movie too but somehow Jarhead doesn’t work at all. It’s the kind of movie that makes me feel like it looks paranoidly over its shoulder at its predecessors and loses its coherence in an underlying net of cross-references. And I’ve not even watched many war movies before.
After that I taped my new song, got into the car and tried finding some vocals while driving to Wuerzburg.
When I arrived Battleship just had started playing and I hurried in and was blown away. I really loved their sound. Intense garage noise rock with a wonderful raw bass guitar sound, great drummer, sick bitter vocals, and a slight feel of wave in the guitar lines. It reminded me a bit of Scratch Acid. I loved it. After that Racebannon sadly were a bit disappointing. I only have their ‘In The Grips Of Light’ album (and the split with Song Of Zarathustra but I don’t like that one – if anyone wants it, I’m up to sell it) and I think it’s a great one, reminiscent of the arty Mike Patton stuff but still a noisy bastard of a 2×12″ record. What they played that night was much more on the metal side of noise core and I’m no big fan of that. Their singer still is one of the most charismatic people around but didn’t really make good for it.

SOOPHIE NUN SQUAD
Nuremberg / Desi Radio Z Fest 25.05.2006
It has been far too long that I didn’t feel like making music but on that day I finally started seriously getting back to songwriting at last. That and the shitty weather kept me home longer than I had planned but I arrived just in time to see a bit of Leopold Kraus Wellenkapelle and then Soophie Nun Squad played. It was the summer fest of our local independent radio station and it turned out to be a really good place for them to play. Lots of people who were ready to have fun and who instantly got into the wild experience between Beastie Boys and Rites Of Spring, between Vaudeville and Hippie Culture that a Soophie Nun Squad show is. They are an amazing band that never fails to bring a smile to my face. For great live pictures of the Soophie Nun Squad Munich show of this tour please visit www.eartrumpet.net!

GRIZZLY BEAR
Nuremberg / K4 Musikverein 22.05.2006
I had caught a bit of a cold at AMSDE Festival so I was glad that Simon took care of the band and I only had to take them home to give them a place to sleep. I was glad that there were enough guests to have a cozy atmosphere which I wasn’t sure about cause it was a Monday night and hardly any people had heard of Grizzly Bear before. My head was humming which usually is a real turn off when it comes to watching a show but Rene gave me some Grippostad and Grizzly Bear were great. Adorable even. Lots of reverb and a love for details and a really good and tight live band. Their music carries the kitschy and dreamy feel of 60s pop to a fresh new century field of experimental folk pop. As they switched drivers that night they were suddenly more people than massacre mansion is fit to keep but it worked somehow and they had to leave really early and Simon turned down my offer for breakfast and I actually was a bit glad that I could sleep my cold off.

AGAINST ME! + ANALENA
Auburg / AMSDE Festival 20.05.2006
AMSDE Festival was a one-off event at a farm in the middle of nowhere near Regensburg = lots of nature, a beautiful plane landscape with some hills with the Walhalla at the horizon. It was a stormy day and we saw lots of rainbows when we drove there. Luckily it didn’t rain. There was only heavy wind blowing and impressive dark clouds. And scared sheep. Although some mean people said that sheep are too stupid to be scared. I drove there with Urte and we met Gunnar again and Ingo of The Company With The Golden Arm and chatted half of the night instead of watching bands. We saw a bit of Analena who weren’t my taste that night, although I like one of their older albums. Sven and Heike and the others of Taugenichtse e.V. who put up that festival had worked hard to turn the farm into a pleasant location and it was a full success. The bands played in a renovated cowshed and outside there was barbecue and a huge campfire. The Against Me! show was big fun, lots of singing alongs and dancing and confetti and a catwalk from the stage and lots of girls up front. It was exactly like what I loved about this band when I first saw them live.

SUBTLE + YOUNG PEOPLE
Nuremberg / K4 Musikverein 13.5.2006
That day was the 30st birthday of our concert group but we didn’t have a big party as we only had found that out one day before but the bar team bought a cake and put so many candles on it that they almost burned down the cake. Young People played first and somehow they seemed a bit distracted. Maybe it was the cold that some of them had, maybe it was the Jaegermeister that circulated on stage. I like it but it wasn’t half as intense as I had expected them to sound live. On their albums they are somehow louder and noisier which builds a wonderful contrast to the folky clear vocals. With Subtle I feel the other way round: They are a fantastic live act but their albums sound comparatively tame. Dose One, the singer, is a born entertainer. It’s pure fun delivered with arty, sometimes even complex indie postrock with lyrical witticisms. I love Dose One’s sense for storytelling. He leads his audience seamlessly from laughter to dismay and back. Oh, and he and the rest of the band looked great – all dressed up in red stage costumes with lovely details that would have put anyone in pimp hiphop to shame. Ha, and I loved the part of the show when he announced that he would now read from the new Henry Rollins book and then drew out some pulp romance book and faked Rollins’ .. erm… ‘powerful’ style ridiculously perfect.

AGAINST ME! + FALCON FIVE
Nuremberg / K4 Musikverein 12.5.2006
It was a show we hardly put any promotion efforts in cause we were afraid that we would have the same fiasco as with Blood Brothers last year when we had to send about hundred people away. We had no possibility to switch to our bigger room on that date so we just hoped that there wouldn’t be too many sad faces that night. Melinda even bought yummy non-gelatine jelly baby thingies to console the kids that wouldn’t get in. It was to be the first show of the Against Me! tour so they arrived early and it was nice to meet them and of course dear Gunnar again who drove them. It was a nice relaxed afternoon with only little problems with missing adapters and a broken bass amp but I could lend them mine. The show was sold out half an hour after we opened the doors but we only had to send 50 people away. It was really weird how the air was filled with excitement that night before the show. The kids in the hallway didn’t stop chanting songs from the first Against Me! albums over handclaps. Falcon Five played first and they played a great show that night with their smart quirky postpunk and masks and sparklers. The sound was great despite them having arrived annoyingly late so there was no proper soundcheck possible. I really hope they keep that band alive cause there are really too few bands around that play that kind of energetic discopunk in a way that doesn’t sound like the x-th rip off of Les Savy Fav / Radio 4 / or should I say Talking Heads / Gang Of 4 etc.
When Against Me! started playing it only took one song to have people pushing up to the stage front so hard that the guys in the first two rows lay on the stage so some of us jumped in as security team to keep them from stage. It was 80% fun but 20% pain cause the stage in the Zentralcafe is not even knee-high so I didn’t get out of this without twisting my knee so bad that I could hardly walk the next two or three days. The fun overruled that though. There were no violent dancers. What I really hate though is boys getting off their shirts on punk shows. It’s not really less hot if you take off your shirt, is it? The only reason I see for that phenomenon is the homoerotic appeal of rubbing their naked chests against each other while dancing with as much body contact as possible. It’s one of the very view settings in which that is allowed. I found it a bit straining to shove dozens of slippery sweaty boys’ chests away from the stage. And no, that didn’t turn me on. Guess what, I don’t like bathing in strangers’ body fluids. I found it slightly self-ironic that I wore my ‘Penis Envy’ Crass shirt. And the show? Well, I stood with my back to the band so I only heard them. I enjoyed it, sang along a bit but am not able to judge if it was a good or a bad show. It was a hot show, that’s for sure.
If you want to see pictures that really manage to capture what the AGAINST ME! shows were like than please go to www.scissabob.de who has awesome pictures of the Munich show.

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