September 2016

LIVE REVIEW: Le Butcherettes, Loppen, 25.09.2016

Published on September 27, 2016 in Live Reviews by Here Today

There are so many references at play in Le Butcherettes’ set at Loppen. There’s an immediate shock of glam with glittery red fabric draped over the synth stands and every guitar shining with silver foil. There’s a militant punk jolt when frontwoman Teri Gender Bender struts out in front of the stage, yelling and thumping before jumping behind a synth, dressed in a fatigue-style jumpsuit with a red band painted across her eyes. There are moments of disco and camp and heavy hits and rock rage.

Le Butcherette’s set is a pageant, pure performance from beginning to end. It’s theatrical and fun, mostly led by Teri’s dizzying energy. She’s undeterred by little things like not having a mic when it will do just as well to bellow into the crowd, or the face paint that runs with sweat and gets smeared along the sides of her hands. No, she’s too busy bouncing around the stage, belting her heart out, stripping off her jumpsuit to reveal a sparkly red dress during — what else? — “Take My Dress Off.”

Teri’s what make the show, for sure, but she’s backed by a smart and sturdy band who can match her vibe. And when there’s scarcely a pause between songs, one suspects that they must match her energy as well, even if in more understated ways.

The set ends with Teri climbing off the stage the same way she came on. The end of the performance is fuzzy as she begins hugging audience members, slowly making her way to the back of the crowd. The room is still dark, the house music comes up, but it’s not until she makes it to the merch table that it becomes clear that the show is over.

LIVE REVIEW: Mitski, Loppen, 24.09.2016

Published on September 25, 2016 in Live Reviews by Here Today

Mitski packs a lot of emotion into two-and-a-half minutes. Her songs channel a familiar heartbreak and frustration. But if you call your latest album Puberty 2, then you’ve got a pretty clear understanding of what vibe you’re projecting.

Still, the most immediate impression Mitski gives during her set at Loppen is of being calm. Her body is relatively still as she sings and plays bass. Her face often has a neutral expression, no matter how long she holds a note. With her band stripped back to just guitar/bass/drums, the evening begins by feeling more intimate than her albums, with space given to her lyrics and her voice and the delicate almost-yodel that sneaks in.

She’s not cut off from the audience however. She’s clearly surprised by the turn out, the genuine familiarity with her songs, and conveys a warm, if nervous, humor. She introduces a dark cover of “How Deep is Your Love” by saying, “This next song was written by someone much richer than me.” The cover, however, not only highlights how strangely creepy the lyrics are to that song, but also serves as the first real display of how powerful her voice can be.

“Francis Forever” is the point in the set where her guitarist turns the volume up on his amp and introduces noise fills that compete with Mitski’s voice. But this is a turning point for her vocals in the set — as the guitars get louder, so does she, still hitting every note perfectly with a ferocity that could knock you back on your heels.

She ends on “last words of a shooting star” solo, delicately strumming a guitar. Though the house music comes up quickly, the crowd continues to cheer until Mitski reluctantly reappears, still alone, and picks up the guitar again. She bashes through a furious version of “My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars” before once again giving a wave and a smile and walking off stage.

At 45 minutes, it’s a short set, especially considering that she has four albums of material to her name, but one that leaves your heart thumping out of your chest.

LIVE REVIEW: Eartheater, Loppen, 21.09.2016

Published on September 24, 2016 in Blog/Live Reviews by Charlie

Photos by Victor Yakimov

On record, Eartheater is an eclectic mix of everything from spacey electronica to lo-fi freak folk. But live, Alexandra Drewchin’s solo persona is that of an uncompromising, confrontational noise artist. It starts with her reaching the stage by wading through the audience, towering above us in her 8″ Converse platforms. Some swift tapping on her laptop triggers an insistent low-frequency rumble, over which Drewchin performs a spoken-word piece, her voice drastically lowered by her trademark vocal effects.

Loppen is by no means packed out tonight, but if anything, this seems to work to Drewchin’s advantage. A significant proportion of her set is instrumental, aided by guitar retrofitted with a midi controller that triggers everything from pure white noise to the sounds of thunder, barking dogs and rainfall. Throughout this Drewchin wanders among the audience, staring them down one at a time, before drifting towards the bar, draping herself over it as if her spine were elastic. You sometimes hear of music being characterized as exploratory (typically standing for pot-induced jam sessions), but in this case the whole point of Eartheater is to test the space on a tactile level.

Eartheater 3

This sounds a little too facetious, the fault is mine. Drewchin is more than happy to cut the intensity of her set with moments of levity and self-effacement, and her physical contortions are as much joyful as they are pained. And as the set draws to a close, even the most bemused members of the audience look buoyed by the experience, or at the very least inspired to take up yoga.

LIVE REVIEW: Deerhoof, Jazzhouse, 13.09.16

Published on September 15, 2016 in Blog/Live Reviews by Charlie

Photos by Amanda Farah

It’s hard to think of a band as fun, weird and childlike as Deerhoof as, well, old, but 20 years in the business is a pretty significant amount of time. With around sixteen albums crowding their discography, the San Franciscan quartet’s unique brand of ultra-hyphenated, off-kilter art-rock has undergone endless refinements. If any band deserves to share that famous trope of the Fall, “always different, always the same”, it’s Deerhoof, a band that could record an album using nothing more than kazoos and still be immediately recognizable.

Case in point: towards the end of their set, I am puzzled by an familiar, but unusually riff-heavy song. After a couple of choruses, straining my ears, I eventually untangle the words: “Pour Some Sugar On Me.” I defy you to go out tonight and find me another band worth their salt playing Def Leppard covers, but more importantly, to incorporate them into a set without it sounding completely bonkers.

Deerhoof live Jazzhouse Copenhagen

It helps of course that Deerhoof’s latest album, The Magic, comes closer to standard rock tropes than most of their recent records. But for every Ramones-channeling “That Ain’t No Life For Me”, there is still a piece of their patented balance of unhinged and deadly precise, a la “Kafe Mania!”. Unhinged is a fairly apposite descriptor of the set as a whole, with John Dietrich’s guitar losing strings every other song.

In these technical pauses, drummer Greg Saunier comes to the rescue. Channeling Crispin Glover and Steven Wright simultaneously, Saunier embarks on tortuous meditations on the heat in Denmark and how it might be affecting both the tuning and the life-span of guitar strings. A good portion of the audience is baffled, but I would be the first to buy Saunier’s HBO special should he decide to ditch the drums for a stand-up career.

For all their fun, there is a challenging element to Deerhoof, a wry art to their playfulness that can sometimes be at the casual listener’s expense. Returning to stage for an encore, flushed by a blistering set, singer Satomi Matsuzaki spends a good ten minutes teaching the audience a rhythmically-challenging call-and-response. Satisfied that we’ve got the gist, the band get going. The song lasts a minute. The band leave. Best ending to a set I’ve witnessed in a while.

LIVE REVIEW: Jeffrey Lewis and Los Bolts, Stengade, 08.09.16

Published on September 12, 2016 in Blog/Live Reviews by Charlie

Jeffrey Lewis: the William Morris of early 21st century Manhattan. A rather bold declaration, and definitely a facetious one, but when confronted with the lo-fi multimedia roadshow that is Jeffrey Lewis and Los Bolts, you can’t help but react with gleeful exaggerations.

Let me follow that with another one: Jeffrey Lewis is one of the very few musicians you can enjoy without knowing a single song he plays. In my case this is almost literally true, since I had not followed Lewis’s career closely, beyond enjoying his musical histories of the Fall and punk on the Lower East Side.

The effectiveness of his lo-fi-dom, typified by the pickup sellotaped to his trusty and battered acoustic, is in the way that the music acts as context, a score for his intimate tales of existential befuddlement. Which is not to say that the music is unimportant, but rather that it is there to serve the lyrics, rather than having a bunch of words thrown on top of it.

They have the immediacy of novelty songs, but their wry observations, particularly in songs like “When You’re By Yourself”, give them the staying power of a short story that gets so close to your daily life that it is no longer a matter of fiction and more one of millennial phenomenology. The pretension is mine, not theirs.

And just when you are worried things might be getting a little to real for you, Lewis is there to help with a capella renditions of Nirvana songs accompanied by literal and hilarious depictions of the lyrics, not to mention a brand new installment of his long-running history of Communism.

The night closes with a Pixies cover, more Nirvana “music videos”, and profuse apologies from Lewis for not having time to play even more songs, giving us just enough time to buy a few (ridiculously inexpensive) copies of his comics before riding home.

LIVE REVIEW: L7, Amager Bio, 31.08.2016

Published on September 1, 2016 in Live Reviews by Here Today

We aren’t quite in the throes of a full-on 90s revival, but surely the return of fanny packs (as they are known in American parlance) means we’re too close for comfort. It’s been amping up for a while — it’s not like kids have stopped being influenced by grunge in the last 20 years — but now it’s also getting more and more toothless. The biggest problem with the nostalgia-inspired younger bands is that they not only lack the energy of bands they’re emulating, but many of those bands are still around and still doing that same schtick better.

L7 is now two years into a reunion that has, as yet, yielded no new songs. If their show at Amager Bio is anything to go on, they’re enjoying every minute of it, happy to bask in the enthusiasm of a crowd of diverse make-up, and happy to whip them into a frenzy before launching into “Fuel My Fire.”

Three decades on from when they formed, their energy is intense, with none of the women standing still for a minute. Once in a while there’s a cheeky comment leading up to a song, like describing “One More Thing” as, “the scrape heard ‘round the world,” but otherwise they barely pause between songs, preferring to jump and shimmy and stagger around. It’s not terribly surprising that the set clocks in just past the hour mark.

But there is an effortlessness to it all: They sound loud, forceful, strong in how they sing and how they play. More than once bassist Jennifer Finch falls to the floor, her legs going up over her head before she swings herself back onto her feet, and it’s amusing instead of contrived. There are more fans on stage than one normally sees, blowing the women’s hair around and preventing them from breaking a sweat (which in the case of drummer Demetra Plakas, with her serene facial expressions, makes her look particularly like she’s in an old rock music video; in the case of Donita Sparks, it’s probably keeping the impressive metallic body art painted up and down her arms from smudging).

It’s tempting to frame this evening as a gathering of awesome women to see awesome women play, but raucousness prevails. There’s plenty of shoving and spilled beer and dodging of flailing arms to preserve the feelings of punk and grunge, for better or worse. But the irony of the bassist shouting, “this one’s for the ladies” being punctuated by dudes lobbing their empty plastic cups at the people behind them is a little too much. There are some behaviors that would be wonderful to see left in the past — sadly, they are still very present.

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