Notes on Rouge Wave @ Bowery Ballroom. All grammar and song title
mistakes entirely the fault of the Rock and Roll music.
BIRD
"Geriatric at twenty." Slow and calculated for proper impact, like the
slow reveal of the third act. Stop start refrain like waves meet shore.
Stop when it should, stops when you want it to go on for hours.
SEASICK
Rockabilly riffs begging for a handclap. Breaks into pop chords between
verses, showing it's underbelly. And oh christ, the breakdown. Into
beachboys and back again.
KICKING MY HEART OUT
Marches in on bass line, toys with exploding into something entirely
different. Bends over the middle like valentine's day gymnastics.
Singing along by the second half, making up the words as you go along.
"If music is my lover, than you are just a tease," and the moment never
comes.
POSTAGE
Good-bye by weeks old letter. Sweet to sour and back again. More
tricks than Cracker and mover clever than a gaggle of Refreshments with
none of the drinking problems.
Okay. Maybe some.
SEWN UP
Chase music from the dumbest, greatest years of your life. Sneering at
your future on the opposite side of the street. Waiting for the wrong
sort of girl to waste the rest of the day with. Summer at Candice's
house. "I'm sewn up and waiting on you." That's exactly right.
EVERY MOMENT
STOMPSTOMPSTOMPSTOMP burns like teenage love, hits like punching
through pictures and the drywall behind them. Spinning on "I used to
think about you and me forever." Triumph in knowing better, pangs at
remembering ignorance.
NOURISHMENT
The rawk. Driving music for the sake of driving. Words fail like
memory, disolving down to ah-Ohs between mispent nights. Good-bye and
good luck, you sad little boozer.
ENDLESS
Echoed lyrics like pushpins on an indie girl's wall. Rolls like a
carnival ride, stops like first love.
ON A PLAIN
Pisses all over pretty dead Kurt with a grin and swagger. Back up
vocals have more sex than any awkward Seattle mall rat. Nirvana's music
as it was meant to be: not for the cynical, not for the teen diarists,
a love letter to the Eels and Convention knocked on it's ear.
And yes, everyone covers Nirvana. But no one - exception of Cibo Matto
- comes close. When you can fill a volkswagon with people that do it
with such care and obvious love while at the same time ripping it's guts
out to replace them with crushed velvet interior, you come back and
fucking talk to me.
LOVES LOST
Ray gun guitar over high hats before coming out the door like storms
breaking. Scribbling letters on bar napkins for all the pretty faces of
the last ten odd years before using them as kindling to burn down all
your familiar couple places. Closure with war drums.
10 to 1
Guitars chopped into splinters. Keyboards like post-coitus breaths. Us
against them triumphalist pop running on maching gun drumming only to
fall over and, gloriously, collapse.