No Age @ The Gargoyle, 11/16/08

First off, the sound at The Gargoyle is exquisitely terrible. That needs to be said and someone needs to do something about it. If you're bringing in top-tier acts like Broken Social Scene, Wolf Parade, Ratatat (joke!), No Age, and Cut Copy (more jokes!), you should be shooting for at least bottom-of-the-barrel quality. That was indescribable though, and this is coming from someone who has never cared about live sound quality beyond "too soft" and "too loud." Glad we got that out of the way.

. . .

Soft Circle, or Hisham Bharoocha, the name provided by the first of two sentences on the Soft Circle Wikipedia entry, played first. And by "played" I mean he sat down at his drum kit and dispassionately expounded on a single formula of song construction that involved 1) making some noises and looping them with store-bought equipment, 2) making some more noises and looping those into a rhythm I could idly tap out on my keyboard right now, 3) jumping in all sudden-like on his trap set as if no one ever saw it coming the second through seventh times, and 4) chanting/moaning stuff. Apparently the guy used to be in Black Dice, but this is what he's doing now.

(Check out the Soft Circle MySpace page that someone spent way too much time constructing and adorning with - yes! you guessed it! - neon colors, and feel sorry for all the suckers who'll be at those nine remaining tour dates)

Beyond the perfectly good half-hour I lost forever to the guy, the most disheartening part was the audience's reaction - nearly everyone was locked into the "yes, I am enjoying this, yes" nodding thing, and then they'd just lose it every time a song ended - just goading that hack on stage to play another song-thing. Somehow this is passing for music that is worth not only performing in front of people, but driving all over an entire continent to do so repeatedly.

Let's not nod our heads to this guys. We can do so much better.

. . .

Turns out there is a God, because Titus Andronicus - a band with guitars and songs and a healthy relationship with the concept of rock and roll - finally took the stage and played us some music. Thank you Titus Andronicus, even though your set was riddled with as many technical errors as all of the other shows I've ever seen combined, and even though I thought you were covering "I Fought the Law" on no less than three separate occasions (which admittedly has its pros and cons, but the cons probably win in the end), and even though your first and last songs were pretty much the exact same song. I can look past all of this - with fervor - because you never once forgot that what makes listening to music so much fun is the part where you have fun. Keep it up, and consider finding some better company.

. . .

No Age brought the crowd to its absolute peak at around sixty (a shock - I was certain it would sell out immediately), which is also probably the number of t-shirts they sold.

After a short bit of requisite guitar ambience (the setlist actually said "Ambient" - it was like seeing "mope" on a Cure setlist, or "prattle" on a Belle and Sebastien setlist), they played "Teen Creeps." It was loud. Long story short, they played a bunch more loud ones bridged by more ambience that was somehow louder than the songs themselves, and then that was it. Randy got about two inches of air on a half-hearted bass drum jump that just ended up looking foolish. But then he jumped off an amp at the peak of "Everybody's Down" and got a sneaker endorsement.

"Eraser" also came with its own gimmick - Randy walked into the audience and really didn't do anything beyond playing his guitar in a different spot than the four-foot radius within which he'd been operating on the stage, but everybody got to touch the guy so it was cool (next time you're at a show and the band does this, notice how the crowd crushes toward the guy and attempts to touch him - very strange). The song was the admitted highlight though, and that goes for their career, too. Great song.

The show concluded with a sort of meet-'n'-greet that consisted of somebody cueing a montage of '90s hip-hop ("Mo Money, Mo Problems," absolutely yes) and Dean and Randy shaking everybody's sweaty hands and presumably answering hastily constructed questions about who-knows-what. T-shirts?

Shout-outs to CrankyYellow.com (as promised) and the two guys who surreptitiously pocketed Bathysphere fliers upon finding them on the floor in the form of paper airplanes - enjoy.

(click to enlarge)

200 fliers + total boredom + 'tis the season = this.

And paper airplanes. We are the best concert attendants ever.

Too much money spent on staff and security (seriously, was the threat level raised to orange last night or what?) for decent lighting.

Blogger McBlogblog comes juking out of nowhere to get in some high-quality video and snapshots with his expensive camera that he clearly does not know how to use.

Somewhere, somehow, Ben Bridwell's middle finger is twitching.

Bigger than Sonic Youth's pedal boards. You decide what that means.


Saying something about how "[expletive] awesome" the fans are, as he did after nearly every single song. Again, you decide.

Note the guitar strapped directly to the amp - this one crossed the ol' pain threshold. Awesome idea though.

Guy in green shirt wins.

The chick sitting down, who, to that point, had been employing the pounding-stage-with-side-of-fist technique, had some sort of hippie freakout during "Everybody's Down."

"I applaud your climbing skills"

Partially indecipherable setlist was snatched by this guy, who has apparently been to an Of Montreal concert at some point. Perhaps...this one?

[photos and review by Zach Noland]