When seven bands are packed to play in a little bit more than 3 hours, you know you won’t be able to see everybody, but there is always this exciting feeling you are attending a sort of mini music festival in the middle of the week. The Warlocks regularly do this sort of show, they invite many bands to open and I can’t keep up with the show especially when it happens on a Wednesday night. I attended their Smoke Out night on the 4th of July, and here I was again, trying to catch 7 bands in one night at the Bootleg theater. I partially failed but ended up seeing five of them, almost six!
Gun/Her started the festivities in the beer room and they were a bass-drum female-male duo, playing a raw and somewhat dark music over distortion. Singer Xe Davis was on bass and she looked and sounded like one of these timeless faces of music, bringing a curious charm and a voice that could go from sweet to raucous jazz, or tearing blues with an intriguing and tough seduction. It sure was minimalist but she was the show as herself, punchy and punky, playing a few songs in a true girl riot spirit, and although the music had basically nothing to do with it, I got Screamin’ Jay Hawlins’ ‘I Put a Spell on You’ in my mind all along…
In the large room, Dream Boys had the perfect moniker for their music, although may be not a very original one, but the quartet’s dreamy harmonies and surfy guitars had an obvious and immediate Byrds feel, with no real frontman and many singers. Their three-part harmonies, their layered guitars were very sweet, catchy and their melodies sounded immediately familiar, which couldn’t be a bad thing. They were playing music as if punk rock had never existed, bringing more upbeat than melancholia, and one of the blonde singers was holding his guitar like the British invasion. Then one of the songs got a bit louder and faster, almost psychedelic, with bolder drums.
Back into the beer room, Blood Candy did start a bit late so I didn’t have the chance to watch their full set, although the three girls and a guy played thunderous music filled by lots of distortion at a sexy slow pace. I know that a lot of bands don’t like this term shoegaze so I am not going to use it here, but I am gonna use sexy, and I hope I won’t sound sexist! This definitively was the effect that these short-skirt girls made on the crowd. Gary Tovar, Goldenvoice founder, was attending the show and told me he had a crush on Asian girls, pointing to Blood Candy’s cute Asian drummer and it got a bit weird! Nevertheless, Blood Candy brought a real dark psychedelia, a razor edge sound, with dreamy vocals, wrapped (or rather buried) into a sweet and sour blend, but man, were they loud!
Then I was ready (or not) for Stardeath and White Dwarfs and their cosmic opera rock or whatever you can call this all-senses-stimulating EDM-like experience. Surrounded by columns of flashing lights blinding the audience, their experimental music was all weirdness with fantastic drum solos, explosive bipolar moments and arena rock ambition with fume-machines … That was impressive for the Bootleg and if I tell you that the lead singer’s name is Dennis Coyne (yes Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne’s nephew) you won’t be exactly surprised. When you grow up with that kind of relative, it probably stains on your psyche forever, or it is completely in your DNA. Who knows? All I know is that he was speaking exactly like his uncle! They also covered Stone Roses’ ‘I wanna be adored’ with the help of the members of Hott MT, oh yeah these guys who crossed half of the US to knock on Wayne Coyne’s door in Oklahoma? But the cover was very good.
I hardly saw anything of Jesus Makes the Shotgun Sound playing in the beer room, but you have to admit that their name is something to pounder on. They played in total darkness and sounded as interesting as mysterious, with female-male harmonies, dark synth stabs, melancholic Radiohead-hits-the-desert melodies and overall a dark atmosphere plus probably a sense of grandiose, but again I hardly heard anything…
When the Warlocks took the stage in the large room, I thought it was at least my third time seeing the famous underground psychedelic LA band, and every time it was very late. The Warlocks have cool haircuts and they don’t smile a lot when they play, but their fuzzy and dense sound is highly recognizable despite installing quite diverse atmospheres. Booby Hecksher’s vocals are a bit curious, often monochord, morose, and high-pitched, but lost in the dense fog and the multiple layers of the druggy ambiance. Speaking of drugs, I read twice that some guy was kicked out of the show because he was smoking pot? What did the security expect? The Warlocks’ music almost induces an automatic drug coma, with layered guitars, a throbbing bass, and a slow-motion ancient trance-dance. Their set’s first part sounded almost too 60’s poppy, too precious and cute for everyone’s expectation of the Warlocks, despite some Velvet underground sweetness. However, after a bunch of slow-mo songs, they got crazier as Hecksher had announced it, with their usual head-bang, stomping psychedelic feast. Watching them live is wondering whether the next tune is gonna get deeper into psychedelia, whether the next song is gonna capture even better their loud and groovy sound. They played a few crowd’s favorites, such as ‘Shake the Dope Out’ (which made Gary Tovar dance from joy) ‘Caveman Rock’, ‘Hurricane Heart Attack’, which almost starts like a slowed-down AC/DC song, and for more than an hour, they were hypnotic and badass, playing with a ravaging energy despite the relative inertia of the music, launching a bomb and watching it fall slowing…. My apologies to Slow White that had already finished their set when the Warlocks were done, but anyway, it was already so late for a Wednesday night, actually it was already Thursday. Six support acts for the same night is way too much but I will survive, look, it’s almost the weekend! By the way, did you see that the Warlocks basically gave away their discography on bandcamp for free? Check out the Facebook page of the event for the codes!
Many pictures of the show here.
