Saturday September 4 - bands in order of appearance:
Funeral Crashers
Ghouls Night Out
Malice In Leatherland
The Brides
The Empire Hideous
Bella Morte
Cinema Strange
Skeletal Family
 

Day two of Drop Dead, and a crowd of dishevelled deathrockers drifts in to the Knitting Factory to check out the early bands. Everyone’s looking a little bleary of eye and green about the gills, and it’s not just deathrock war paint. Yesterday’s exertions have, it seems, taken their toll. But, ready or not, here comes the first of those bands: New York’s very own Funeral Crashers.

Now, here is a confession. Sitting here in London, writing up the festival some time after the event, I find to my alarm that I have no memory of the Funeral Crashers’ sound. My photos show a singer who seems to be doing a Robert Smith-ish thing, but whether this influence is reflected in the music I cannot say at this distance. My hastily-scribbled notes, beer-stained and half-illegible, contain no clues; in fact, they contain no mention at all of the band. Somehow, the Funeral Crashers managed to pass straight through my head without touching the sides. Sorry, Funeral Crashers. But better to admit my lapse than to bluff my way along with some bland generalisations. We shall move swiftly on to the first band of the day that I actually *can* remember.

We also move downstairs at this point, to the Knitting Factory’s second, smaller, stage. As a matter of fact, you have to half-close your eyes and suspend your disbelief somewhat to accept the small triangle of raised floor in one corner of the downstairs bar as a stage, but this minimal platform plays host to a full range of bands throughout Drop Dead’s three days. Today’s opening act is a collection of rock ‘n’ roll girls called Ghouls Night Out, and if you don’t know that’s a Misfits song title you should hand back your deathrock card forthwith. The band’s choice of name hints at where they’re coming from. The band also tell us where they’re coming from - Boston, to be exact, and the traffic was bad. They’re a combination of vintage influences topped off with a punk rock seasoning, and they sound like they’ve stepped out of a production of Grease as arranged by Joe Strummer. It’s that 50s rockette thing with a bit of punky verve, and it’s done well. But I’d guess that Ghouls Night Out are a very new band - I’d even hazard that this is one of their first gigs - because they seem diffident and restrained in front of an audience, concentrating on getting the music right rather than putting on a show. They’re cool but they don’t quite catch fire, if you’ll allow me to mix my metaphors in public. I’d like to see the band again after they’ve got, say, another year’s worth of gigs under their guitar straps, because then I think by then they’ll have loosened up and be ready to rock out with a bit more flamboyance. As it is, we’ll file them under ‘potential’.
 

"It’s a bit like turning up to your favourite vegetarian restaurant and finding they’ve put steak pie on the menu."

Now, let’s take some 90s alt-rock influences (Soundgarden, Reef, and other suchlike post-grunge heoes). Mix with some virtuoso-muso 70s prog  (King Crimson, Rush). Dress in fishnet, apply spiky/mohawk hairstyles. And hey presto! You’ve got our next band on stage: hot deathrock contenders Malice In Leatherland. Or, at least, that seems to be the theory. Malice In Leatherland (a name which, I must remark in passing, sounds to me like an Agatha Christie murder mystery set in a gay club) certainly have the image nailed down, but musically they’re a world away from the post-punk aesthetic which informs the Drop Dead festival as a whole. Check out those vocals: a Chris Cornell-ish stentorian croon that threatens to turn every song into a lighters-in-the-air power ballad. Check out those basslines, darting about the rhythm like playful kittens. And check out that guitar, giving it the freaky solo thing like it’s 1973 all over again. Oh, and the time changes. Yep, on occasions Malice In Leatherland indulge in those classic proggy time-changes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they refer to these bursts of differing tempos as ‘movements’, as if their songs are mini-symphonies. If all this makes the band sound like an odd choice for a festival like this - well, yes, they are. Their natural audience, surely, would be a combination of chin-stroking prog-heads and headbangin’ metal kidz. Here, playing essentially pre-punk music to a post-punk audience, they come across as the mother of all non-sequiturs. But, weirdly, Malice In Leatherland don’t seem to notice the disconnection. Maybe they think it’s an image thing: if you’ve got the right hairstyles, then you’re automatically in. It’s as if they haven’t realised that the post-punk aesthetic is supposed to extend to the music as well. Oh, they’re good, no doubt about that. They’re fast and slick and confident, and, I’m sure, could effortlessly hold their own at a big metal show. If Iron Maiden are looking for an opening act for their next tour of the world’s Enormodomes, here’s a band who could step right up and handle it. But to encounter music like this at the Drop Dead festival is quite bizarrely incongruous. It’s a bit like turning up to your favourite vegetarian restaurant and finding they’ve put steak pie on the menu.

Up to the main stage again. Here come The Brides. On a bill liberally splattered with New York bands, The Brides are probably the most New York-ish, in that they’ve got that new-wave-filtered-through-sixties-pop sound - which I always associate with the late 70s onwards New York scene - neatly skewered. It’s as if someone locked them in CBGB overnight with just the first two Blondie albums (you know, the ones recorded before Mike Chapman turned Blondie into slick superstars) for company. They’re speedy and punchy and they rattle through their songs like subway trains. They have those endearingly cheesy keyboard lines squawking through everything, and that classic class of ‘79 guitar sound. The frontman even sports a vintage Jimmy Destri hairstyle. The only incongruous visual note is struck by the drummer, who looks like he’s taking time off from a doom metal band - but, fortunately, doesn’t play like that. All this doesn’t mean that The Brides come across as some kind of retro outfit, mind. They have a quirky but no-shit brio about them that’s entirely here and now. In fact, if I had to predict which out of all the bands on the Drop Dead bill might go on to fame and greatness beyond the confines of ‘the scene’, then The Brides would be that band. In these post-Franz Ferdinand times, their look is very contemporary (well, give or take the odd doom metal drummer) and their sound grabs the post-post-punk zeitgeist and takes it for a gleeful pogo around the floor. I’m sure it wouldn’t take much convincing to make the pop kids of today fall in love with ‘em. This being a home-town gig, the band have plenty of fans down the front to dance and yell and laugh at the between-song quips, but I dare say The Brides could whip up that kind of enthusiastic reaction from any audience. They have that essential spark.
 

"The music is a darkly dramatic rock blast over which the vocals roar and soar like Bono in a bad mood."

OK, who’s this talking? “It’s got to be captivating enough to crack people in the face like a sledgehammer. And once you’ve got their attention by breaking their faces with that sledgehammer, you continue to bash their skulls in with every ounce of attention you can bash them with.” That’s Myke Hideous, frontman and main man with our next band, The Empire Hideous, giving us his take on live performance. Those words are, as you may well have noticed, quoted on the StarVox concert reviews index page. I’ve never felt particularly comfortable with that quote: in the first place, there’s something rather unpleasant about all that violent imagery, metaphorical though it might be. And in the second place, to regard a performance as nothing more than an opportunity to bludgeon the audience with a virtual blunt instrument is surely a limited and one-dimensional view. For my money, the best performers employ subtlety and seduction as much as sheer force. They can take us on a shamanistic journey to somewhere else, to the point where being dropped back into reality at the end of the show comes as something of a shock. It’s not just about some sort of bash-the-bastards attitude. But hey. Let’s give Myke Hideous a chance to give his sledgehammer a twirl. I stand in anticipation as the band takes the stage, skull all ready to be bashed in.

My first impression is that The Empire Hideous are one of those bands that’s all about the frontman. The musicians are the traditional bunch of heads-down-keep-it-real musos, dressed in scruffy black, keeping back from the limelight. The entire focus of the band is Myke Hideous himself, looming over the audience in what looks like his Dad’s old gardening hat.  Curiously, he seems to employ the hat as a prop to shield himself from the audience - keeping the brim pulled down, while for much of the set adopting a head-tilted-up stance at the mic, directing most of his attention to the lighting rig. Only relatively infrequently does he abandon these ploys and actually make eye contact with the crowd: by relentlessly stalking him with the camera I manage to capture one or two of these moments on film. It’s all a bit odd, because the occasions on which he does eyeball the audience with a cold and baleful stare are small moments of drama, allowing us little glimpses of the real charisma of the man, which, bizarrely, he seems to keep strictly rationed. The music is a darkly dramatic rock blast over which the vocals roar and soar like Bono in a bad mood. Now there’s a comparison that might seem surprising, but Myke Hideous does indeed have a vocal style which approaches the blessed Bono in melodrama, if not necessarily in timbre. He even uses that Bono-esque stadium rock scat style in many of the songs, never wasting an opportunity to give us a full-on ‘Wooo-oah-oooh!’ at any convenient opportunity. ‘Two Minutes to Midnight’ captures the essence of the band: a big production number that’s all wide-screen rock dramatics and spiralling guitars. I’m not entirely convinced, mind. I can’t help wishing the band as a whole would cut the crap and launch themselves, gung-ho and seething, at the audience. As it is, the let’s-keep-out-of-this attitude of the musicians, and Myke’s own strange reticence to connect gives the performance a bit of a five out of ten-ish feel. I can’t help feeling that something’s missing here. The final verdict? Close, but no sledgehammer.
 

"Look at them go, a loony swirl of humans and instruments, and everyone in the audience is grinning and dancing like they’ve just had an energy transfusion." 

Fortunately, my dented faith in the power of live performance is about to get panel-beaten back into shape. Because, ladies and gents, next on stage we have the mighty Bella Morte, a collection of ballistic missiles in human form, a band renowned in moshpits throughout the known world for not exactly being backward in coming forward. Their set tonight proves that they’re in no danger of losing their touch. They hurl themselves into every song in a blur of flailing limbs and rampant hairstyles, all gurns and grins and set-piece punkish vogueing - look at the way vocalist Andy Deane will strike a goofy pose, hanging himself out over the monitors, holding his move just so long and no longer, then swinging back into the song without missing a beat. You can tell this band has honed its stage show over umpteen gigs. It might look like seven kinds of crazy chaos up there, but Bella Morte instinctively know just how much of the goofing and spoofing they can throw in before it’s time to hit that ol’ riff bang on its nose again. There’s a special mention for the song ‘Another Way’, for which, apparently, the band has made a video. The general idea is that we’ve all got to write to the likes of MTV and get Bella Morte on the world’s TV screens by sheer pester power. That might be a bit of a long shot, but there’s certainly potential for crossover success in the song itself, nailed as it is to an insistent guitar riff backed up by a throbbing synth pulse. Yep, I can envisage everyone from the Blink 182 fans to the NIN kidz getting into this one. Let’s hope MTV do the right thing.  But even if the meeeja remains unmoved, I’m sure Bella Morte will continue to build success by doing what they do best: getting on stage and catching fire. Look at them go, a loony swirl of humans and instruments, and everyone in the audience is grinning and dancing like they’ve just had an energy transfusion. It’s also worth noting that Bella Morte’s set is the first time today that the main stage area of the Knitting Factory has become appreciably crowded. Many of the previous bands pulled respectable crowds, to be sure, but Bella Morte haul punters from every corner of the venue and really pack ‘em in. It’s obvious that they’re one of the star attractions at Drop Dead, and with that legendary stage show it’s not hard to see why.

But after Bella Morte have finished, and the dust has settled, the crowd doesn’t disperse. Everybody’s keen to stick around and see the following band, who are also quite clearly regarded as something special. Who are they? Cinema Strange, of course - and while you’d be hard pressed to find two more dissimilar bands, it’s obvious that the audience regards both Bella Morte and Cinema Strange as the stars of Drop Dead. Anticipation crackles in the air, and then Cinema Strange are on. They’re dressed for the occasion in oriental costumes and masks, like they’re about to embark on a demonstration of Noh theatre, or give us a bizarrely cast production of The King And I. All, that is, except for Michael Ribiat, on guitar, who appears to have come as Tony Blair. Centre stage, Lucas Lanthier is robed and remote, surveying the crowd as if we’re apprentices who’ve come to study at his feet. I half expect him to address us as ‘Grasshopper’.

As ever, Cinema Strange’s costumes and the concepts which presumably lurk behind them are a delicious mystery, but the band’s adoption of such shifting styles makes one thing clear for anyone who cares to note it.  Cinema Strange have moved on quite drastically from their earlier incarnation as a fairly standard fishnets ‘n’ mohawks deathrock band. That might seem like a no-brainer observation, but it seems to me that many people haven’t quite twigged it yet. Consider this: many of the photos of the band you see around are relatively old shots, which depict the ‘old’ Cinema Strange, doing the regular deathrock-image thing. Even Cinema Strange’s own Yahoo group is illustrated with a photo of the band costumed as mildly eccentric punkers, while the Drop Dead programme features a shot of Cinema Strange in all their former mohawked madness to advertise Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. That’s a rather surreal thing in itself: Papst Blue Ribbon is the tipple of choice for people who drive pick-ups with gun racks on the back, and use words like ‘Varmint’ in everyday conversation. I could envisage Deadbolt advertising Pabst Blue Ribbon, but Cinema Strange? Surely they’re more of a dry white wine band! But there’s the photo, and there’s my point: Cinema Strange have moved so far out on their own limb these days that the deathrock scene which spawned them is having trouble keeping up.
 

"Everything they do is gift-wrapped in mystery, as if the band’s show is a live-action set of cryptic crossword clues. Either that or they’re just ‘avin’ a larf, of course."

So, the performance. It is, of course, a gleefully theatrical flounce through some of the band’s greatest hits, with the audience hanging on every word and gesture as if they contain pearls of ancient wisdom. And perhaps they do, although Cinema Strange are not in the business of giving too much away. Everything they do is gift-wrapped in mystery, as if the band’s show is a live-action set of cryptic crossword clues. Either that or they’re just ‘avin’ a larf, of course. Either way, they swoop and pirouette in a random rock ‘n’ roll ballet, as if every chord and chorus has its own particular move, while the sound - that peculiar, tense, wound-up-like-clockwork racket - churns around them. Don’t let all this talk of theatrics fool you: Cinema Strange are a very powerful live band, with a sound that is several times more gutsy than the frankly rather weedy production on their albums would have you believe. Much of that beefing-up of the sound is down to the band’s drummer, who hurls himself into the rhythms with such power and precision that every beat hits the target like a smart bomb. Naturally, Cinema Strange receive ovation after ovation from the assembled, eager, audience of catacomb kittens, but typically maintain their reserve, never milking the applause as lesser bands might do. They bring the show to a controlled climax, and are gone. That’s Cinema Strange for you. Every night something different; every night an experience.

It’s now getting on for three o’clock in the morning. Drop Dead has been running late, and with the end of Cinema Strange’s set, many people decide to call it a night. The crowd thins out, but the show ain’t over yet.  Skeletal Family are due on stage. I dare say that this slot - last band of the night, in what would normally be considered the headline position - looked good on paper, but now, in the early hours, facing a reduced crowd, it probably doesn’t seem quite such a plum. Still, the band assemble and launch into a suitably assertive set of their classic tunes. The inevitable ripple of ‘Who’s that on vocals?’ runs around the assembled company, as old-skool fans get their heads round the fact that  Skeletal Family have a new singer, but there’s less of this bemusement than I expected. Most people here are too young to have any first-hand memory of Skeletal Family’s classic Anne-Marie incarnation, and anyway I don’t believe the band ever played in the USA in the old days. Therefore any line-up would be a new line-up to this New York audience. But wait - there’s a problem.  Suddenly, everything stops, and the band leave the stage. There’s no announcement, but I gather that the snare drum has fallen apart. There’s a lengthy - and entirely unexplained - delay, during which yet more of the crowd, baffled, disappointed, unaware of the problem and under the impression that it’s all finished for the night, decide to leave. But someone eventually finds another snare, the band come back, and away we go again. It’s difficult to pick up the momentum after that interlude of kaput-ness, but the remaining audience comprises the real diehard fans - Michael Ribiat of Cinema Strange among them, I notice, enthusiastically singing along - so although the numbers are down the enthusiasm levels remain high. The band leaves the stage to a warm gust of applause, and if Skeletal Family’s New York debut wasn’t quite the blockbuster they’d probably anticipated, at least they can congratulate themselves on making the best of adverse circumstances.

And that’s it for the night. Time to stumble off to bed - only a few hours to go and we’ll be back for day three.
 
 

11/21/04