The Troubadour had another great night of music on Thursday night, three bands bringing quite different atmospheres, but altogether, it was totally worth the $15!
Carletta Sue Kay took me by surprise, and in these Caitlyn-Jenner-obsessed times, I really shouldn’t have been surprised! Carletta was a tall man, with a disheveled long brown hair wig, wearing red lipstick and an amazing vintage dress (or was that homemade cape/sheet really a dress?). If this comical vision could have fit in any drag queen parade, Carletta’s singing was the most poignant one you could have imagined. They actually were a full band, coming from San Francisco, with cello, guitars and keys, but I only had eyes for Carletta who was reaching many octaves, transcending genres, and giving a gut wrenching performance. Her operatic croon was flamboyant and dramatic but it was absolutely great, the type to make you smile while giving chills along the spine…
‘I always identified that the songs themselves should be sung as a girl and using that information, it made me want to do them as a girl,’ said Randy Walker (Carletta’s real name) in an interview. ‘I think, though, with my phrasing and the way I do my songs, it comes out naturally. The queen comes out. But I’m not a drag queen. Hello? Drag queens lip-sync.’ Oh there was certainly no lip-sync at all, and his singing was simply astonishing. Even Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields noticed her: ‘I love Carletta’s singing’, he said. ‘She has an androgyny similar to Nina Simone… but without the bitterness.’ He loves her so much that she can be heard on The Magnetic Field’s newest record ‘Love at the Bottom of the Sea’. I concur, she was tapping her foot, wiping her sweaty face, throwing her fist in the air during her epic songs going from melancholic poppy tunes to cathartic numbers, sounding heartfelt despite the bombast and the wig, looking grotesque but producing a beautiful and truly moving experience. And when she removed her wig during the last song, the scene had all the dramatic effect of a theatrical scene, like the ones staring Julie Andrews or Dustin Hoffman in ‘Victor Victoria’ or ‘Tootsie’… The perfect confusion of genres for a truly sweaty rock & roll number…
Birth Defects continued the night on a totally different rhythm, rising a monster at each song, and inducing a massive collective head banging with their hard rocking sound. I had seen them before, and Thee oh Sees’ fans will recognize ex-guitarist Petey Dammit, especially at the way he holds his guitar. They were truly impressive, with some raw-power vocals by Jason Finazzo and a tinnitus-inducing music, going from punk hardcore to an AC/DC-type of energy, without forgetting about melodies. It was their record release party, and their album ‘First 8 Mistakes’ was produced by Ty Segall and released on Wavves frontman Nathan Williams’ label Ghost Ramp… how can they go wrong?
‘Ty offered to record the record for free because he’s the nicest fucking dude ever, said frontman Jason Finazzo to The FADER. ‘Took a total of three hours to record it. A couple weeks later I passed it along to Nate [of Wavves]. He offered to put it out. So, of course, we said fuck yeah. I guess the next step is to keep drinking in dark bars.’
They looked and sounded like a force of nature and they simply slaughtered the place, starting a mosh pit among the generally well-behaved crowd of the Troubadour. Their hardcore punk rock was making sweaty hair stick in the face, tattoos shake off the skin, and the quartet sang with an unapologetic attitude about ‘Drugs’, ‘Party Suicide’, ‘Bad Shit’ and ‘Drunken Religious Rant by a Soulless Haethen’, if I read the setlist correctly. It was a powerful performance bringing euphoria in loudness.
Last month, when I realized that Fuzz was playing at the Troubadour, it was already sold out! I guess I got lucky as a few more tickets were released this week and I could get one. Each project which has Ty Segall’s name attached to it (he is in a million of different bands), sells out very fast and there is a reason why it is happening, he and his bands are very very good. For his heavy metal/hard rock outfit, the very prolific Ty was on drums, in central position between Charles Moothart on guitar and Roland Cosio on bass. And as soon as they started it was a hell of a ride with more head banging above heavy metal or sludgy riffs, a myriad of garage rock chunks, wrapped in a punk fury and of course fuzzy distortion. I was in the front, and it suddenly got very rowdy, but I survived and stayed there for the whole show just because the Troubadour is not the Echoplex, but the power trio did its job alright with the usual crowd surfing and sneakers bumping in my head.
Ty Segall was the main vocalist and their music was a maze of heavy distortion with long hard-rocking guitar solo jams, piercing bass lines, Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin grooves, although Segall’s vocals were here to remind us we were in 2015. The trio seemed to have a very good time, there was a real playfulness into their performance, and the music was building some incredibly complex psychedelia and meandrous soundscapes… However, they hardly stopped between songs, and I could not see any setlist so that their show did sound like a big blob of furious sound, rather than a series of songs.
They announced they had recorded a new album and I guess they played new songs (a new one may be called ‘Pipe’), all very guitar-oriented, with a few quieter moments soon crashing into more chaos…’Free your mind, your ass will follow’, shouted Ty a few times, but they didn’t say much during the whole show, and why should they have, these incredible musicians express themselves the best through music, playing frantically, while the melody was running after their jams without never catching them.
More pictures of the show here.
