Too many people neglect the opening bands, this is true that seeing 3 or 4 bands in a row can be a little too much sometimes, but getting early at the Echo made me discover great and fun bands,… that’s how I got to know Fidlar for example! And opening for Disappears on Thursday night at the Echo, was a very fun band with an exotic name (Wounded Lion) which transformed the stage in a sort of jungle, visually, with all that bouncing and tambourine-and-limbs-in-the-air, and lyrically, with songs talking about monkeys, parrots and walrus.
Their short foot-tapping-injection-type songs were not to be taken too seriously with their frenetic and messy delivery, and the four or five of them, depening on the songs, were having fun at goofy-ing around on stage, Lars Finberg, Raffi Kalenderian, Shant Kalenderian, and Jun Ohnuki constantly trading places and instruments. The music, kind of minimalist at times, was very efficient with apparently simple lyrics which would deserve to be looked at, since the opening line of their first song, ‘There are two kinds of monkeys in the world, old world, new world, which one are you?’ made me laugh right away.
Frontman Brad Eberhard (on vocals and guitar) was playing angry, but funny-angry, with some David-Byrne-punk delivery, and the whole thing looked authoritarian, with multi-vocal shouted harmonies, but nothing sounded serious as they looked like they could barely maintain everything together, giving the total wrong impression that their chaos could fall apart at any given moment. It didn't!
Their music actually sounded quite simple to figure out on stage with all this funny business going on, but their garage-rock with shouted vocals is more difficult to describe on paper, as it was multi-influenced, often producing buoyant melodies with distorted riffs or even surfing guitars.
I was looking at Brad Eberhard, holding his guitar like the British invasion, when they did a funny cover of T-Rex’s ‘20th Century Boy’, showing the same unstoppable energy, trading place again in a continuous romping movement.
There was a true freedom in the LA band’s performance, freedom of movement and expression, but nevertheless a directness, a return to the basics. I read that Eberhard is also a successful painter, and that would open a completely new subject about correspondences between both arts.
setlist
Monkeys
Wyld Parrots
Walrus
Creatures in the cave
Black Ops
Dagoba system
Roman Values
20th Century boy
Silver People
I’m sad