Last night, Bruar Falls threw a birthday party for The Men’s bassist Chris and hosted a series of bands for the occasion. My love of The Men’s Immaculada should be well known by now, but their habit of putting all of their music online for free has given me a deeper appreciation for their abilities as a band beyond the noise and genre explorations with which I was initially familiar.
I’ve only been to Bruar Falls a few times, and it’s always been a pretty good showing. There isn’t much of an area for music and it can be difficult to try to maneuver around to either the bar or the inconveniently placed bathroom when the music starts. The sound quality is good, but it can get loud, so always bring earplugs.
I was only familiar with two of the acts on the bill, one fairly well, the other only in passing. I picked up Pigeon Religion’s Crystallized Meth 7” essentially on a whim, owing more probably to the name of the band than to any sort of desire for yet another “BLAST OF BRUTAL NOISE FROM THE ARIZONA DESERT” or however it was sold to me.
I found Crystallized Meth to be pretty good. The A-Side was taken up by the 7 minute “Crystallized Meth” and it starts off with a kind of desert drone intonation which repeats for about half of the song which calls to mind the flat expanses of where I spent most of my childhood with feedback interjected like the calls of carrion birds come to watch the song die. Yet it does not die, the halfway mark of the song doubles the beat of the drum and injects the shout singing of William Watson as he shouts “I am the scavenger” the music works within the themes from before, expanding the sound floor and the time and tempo collapses and expands under the pressure of the vocals until entropy takes hold and the threads of the song collapse.
It’s pretty heavy stuff.
The B-Side’s two songs don’t have the length, but the do have the power of the A-Side. “Rust” carries the drone noise and propulsive drumming into a series of mind-expanding loops with little variation between the sequences of the track. “Dust” explores the tempo of the first half of “Crystallized Meth” as everything is a plodding, weary effort that barely moves. It’s not quite comfortable listening, but if the listener can find the rhythms at which the band moves, than it can be quite rewarding.
Attempts to find the rest of the Pigeon Religion catalog through either licit or illicit means was not successful. I found a tape rip of the Warm Insides release, which is a live recording that incorporates loops and electronics but wasn’t able to find any of neither their previous singles nor their album. It’s an odd position to be in for the modern music hunter. Research online found that they have a bit of a reputation, so when I found they were coming to Brooklyn, I had to check it out. If nothing else to try and raid their merch table. Unfortunately it didn’t work out that way.
The first act of the night was Divorce Money which struck me as someone who listened to drone but felt it was way too slow and instead decided that what it absolutely needed was speed and anger, which Divorce Money brings to it in spades. Perhaps drone is wrong, but there’s a layer of nuclear dust on everything, choking the life from the songs, but then that’s put into a spastic spin and even this insane description doesn’t really begin to do the band justice. The lead singer started things off in a fetal position, punched himself in the face several times and then started shouting into the mic. It was kind of impressive to see that level of violent self-inflicted anger infuse the performance and it continued as he threw himself into the wall and audience and slammed his head against the floor. I picked up their 7” and have promised to email them to get future dates from them as it’s something I want to catch with a bit more context so I’m not stuck going “gee whiz, this dude hates walls” and can concentrate a bit more on the music.
The Men were pretty much all I could have hoped for from their short set. They opened with guitarist playing a bit of clarinet before launching into my favorite song on Immaculada and it was there that I learned how much of the vocal duties are split amongst the three members of the band as the drummer tried frantically to keep up the tempo and sing the lead of the song. The music could get a bit sloppy, but it was a controlled sloppiness that never really felt like it was out of the hands of the performers. The passion of The Men’s music carries into the live shows and it makes catching them perform absolutely essential.
Hell-Kite is the project of Ann Marie Philip, whose MySpace songs do not do the live experience justice. Touring with Pigeon Religion, she captured that duo and another to flesh out her songs, giving them the kind of asymmetric intensity that clashes with what you expect versus what you get.
Her MySpace songs are her with an acoustic guitar and occasional added percussive elements. Live, they built a literal wall of speakers on stage and played on the floor. Herself on electric guitar, William Watson on bass, drummer Jes Aurelius, and James playing what looked like a child’s toy that played noise based on magnetic strips on paper cards, like a metro card. It was intense and haunting, like listening to the stories of the dead.
Pigeon Religion live matches the music perfectly. They turned out all the lights in the area, including the sound board and turned the volume up, and started to flash a strobe light and that’s how they played; in the dark, with occasional glimpses of the musicians. William came from behind bass to sing, the James replaced him, and they added another musician (edit: Gerald Biggs, thanks to commenter for correcting) playing a variety of electronics to round out the sound.
They played straight through with few or no breaks between tracks; opening with “Crystallized Meth” they followed the pattern of this song, as periods of glacial inactivity would be replaced with periods of intensity. The only light was the strobe and the occasional flash of my camera as I tried to document something, anything of this show. Through the strobe, I would see musicians contort and fling themselves to the floor or at each other, but by the time the strobe flared again, they’d be in a different position. It became a challenge to comprehend anything as Ann’s guitar had a little red light so she could check finger placement and as she moved to and fro the light would become hypnotic as it danced in time to the music being played.
With the darkness and the music distorting all sense of time and scale, the set lasted seconds. It lasted a million years. They played every song. They played one song. There was a palpable layer of unease, something I’d never really experienced at a music performance before. Pigeon Religion accomplished with nothingness that many acts have failed to accomplish with baroque excesses.
I don’t think I’d ever seen anything like Pigeon Religion before, and there’s a part of me that hopes I never do.
Yet there also remains a gnawing hunger which craves more…