The Vandelles, The Morning After Girls and The Warlocks – Grog Shop – August 8

(Editor’s note:  We wore earplugs to the show this evening.  We were expecting a full on aural assault, given the sheer volume of The Warlocks recorded output, assumed there would be a significant amount of tympanum-shattering distortion (there was) and were feeling the full weight of our status as tetriagenarians.  It’s the first time that we’ve gone into a gig with our ears artificially steeled.  We walk out fully willing to tell you, dear reader, that Pete Townshend is right. Our enjoyment was not tempered a bit.  Rather, we were able to place ourselves fully in the center of all the bands’ feedback laced attack with no fear of tinnitus.  I, for one, will be going to everything that isn’t a twee folk show with rubber in my earholes.  And I won’t feel like a pussy either.)

Doors opened at 8, while the concert started promptly at 10 something and ended at 1 am.  (Maybe all the bitching Kevin’s done about starting things at a reasonable hour  has done some good.) That said, it seemed like the show went by in a blink of an eye. You know that’s a good thing.  We sat through about an hour of down time when we entered the Grog Shop and the venue had a calm before the storm feel to it.  The first two bands were well-suited to open for The Warlocks.  Both bands had powerful stage presence, that, paired with a certain similarity in sound, led to smooth transitions from group to group.

The first set of the night came courtesy of The Vandelles, the perfect cure for a case of post french onion soup sluggishness. The big beat driven Brooklyn based band didn‘t waste any time getting the Cleveland Heights crowd amped for a night of top notch rock n’ roll. The Vandelles’ sound fit right in with the Caveman Rock vibe of the Bobby Hecksher lead  headliner with songs like ”Lovely Weather” and the surf rock flavored “Bad Volcano”. They tore through their 7 or 8 song set with enough energy collectively to put Iggy Pop in check. Once The Vandelles took the stage they crushed us with thumping bass lines, powerful fuzzed out guitar arrangements, and delicious harmonies. Watching Suzanne (known withing the bans as Gidget for some reason) pummel the skins with such a high level of ferocity was worth the $12 on it’s own. If you find yourself a bit sluggish when these guys come to town, I guarantee if you have enough energy to make it to the show, the band will take care of the rest.

The Morning After Girls were next on the bill. Sacha Lucashenko and Martin Sleeman, recent transplants from Australia to NYC, shared vocal duties on most of the songs.  Both offered melodious, gentle deliveries, periodically trading a soft whispered voice, with a clear confident one in songs like “The General Public” and “Hidden Spaces”.  Anthony Johnson attacked his drum set from the comfort of his stool and occasionally used the law of gravity to his advantage (the dude got air, I like when drummers got hops).The Morning After Girls came out swinging with their brand of dreamy psychedelic rock, immersing the crowd in a soothing haze of tranquilizing sound during “Chasing Us Under”.  The guys also blasted the audience with the borderline anthemic guitar lick loaded “Alone” and “Shadows Evolve”.  At one point the band commented on how the other groups on tour helped them out when they were in a bind and were very pleased to be on tour with such good people, which is nice to see.

We’ve talked a lot in recent weeks about art and the realtionship that the artist is forced to form with the audience.  Kevin’s talked about the importance of the audience and the band’s perception thereof as a kind of critical lynchpin.  Justin’s talked about the things that happen when a band is unable to connect with an audience.  I’ve often taken the stance that art ought to exist outside of any audience, that the act of creation is enough.  Strangely, The Warlocks set on Saturday served as an intersection of many of those ideas.  The Warlocks play music in a way that implies that either they think no one is watching or, perhaps more interestingly, they don’t give a shit if anyone is.  The band plays in front of spacey films (a widening gyre, rapidly rotating french words, a white horse), drenches every tune in waves of distortion, routes all vocals through a serious bit of machinery, hammers on the big hollow bodies, eliciting shrieks and howls, and, in general, acts as though the set is taking place in The Village in 1969 without a trace of irony or distant self-awareness.  The Warlocks are real.

The set can be, to a degree, encapsulated in the next to last track that the band laced into, “Song for Nico” from the 2001 release Rise and Fall.  After the gig, guitarist John Christian Rees passed along that the band doesn’t play it all that often in clubs, generally reserving it for record shops and other slightly quieter venues.  Happily, The Warlocks favored the Grog Shop with the tune on Saturday and, perhaps inadvertently, gave a fairly bold statement on what sort of thing they’re about.  Look.  Let’s be frank.  It’s not a lot of acts that can pull off a song that so overtly references The Velvet Underground and not come off as either backwards-looking weirdos or idol-worshiping lames.  The Warlocks, however, have the chops, sonic approach and attitude to make a tune like “Song for Nico” make sense.  It was a transcendent moment live and one which forced the crowd to accept that, while Bobby Hecksher isn’t Lou Reed circa 1968 , he’s about as close as we’re going to get in the twenty-first century.  (Give me a break with that Berlin shit.)  This is a band that’s about visceral emotiveness, kicking faces with pomp and reverb, and, in short, selling the songs.  (Not in a cheap comercialist sense, but in the what makes a live act a live act sense.)

The set was more about the feeling that I tried to describe above than anything as concrete as individual songs.  The band blended most tunes together with a hellacious bit of feedback and knob spinning, keeping the set in a perpetually re-inventing flow.  There were moments that stood out from the ether (the serious stomp of “Caveman Rock,” and the melodious rush of “Red Camera” both spring to mind), but, for the most part, the gig was about the willingness of the band to dive headfirst into the atmosphere and emerge with a bloody maw full of rock.  I’d have bet you a billion dollars that I wouldn’t see a band attempt the Jefferson Airplane-esque cinematic backdrop in 2009 and both pull it off and have me buy in whole-heartedly, but The Warlocks hit that trick with ease.  It was a set of throwback psych rock that made me feel like a pure listener.  Shit was good.  Go see this band if they get close.

Lastly, you know that we grab setlists.  That’s just how we do.  Tonight, we’ll hit you with a double bill, as we snagged both The Warlocks’ (on the right) and The Morning After Girls ‘ (on the left) codifications of what they were going to do.  The best part of either is clearly the bit on The Warlocks set labeled, simply, “Feedback Drone.”  In practice, this turns out to be ten minutes of so of the quintet eking out otherworldly noise that’s both wildly impressionistic and oddly tuneful.  Word.

I didn’t manage to snag any audio tonight, at least partially because I thought my recording device might spontaneously combust from too much input, so enjoy a track from the stellar Heavy Deavy Skull Lover and the aforementioned “Song for Nico.”

The Warlocks – Moving Mountains

The Warlocks – Song for Nico

Snag The Warlocks at insound.