Did Crystal Antlers start their set with ‘Fuck The USA’? I am not sure as the lyrics are always hard to understand live, and I didn’t know the song! But I think it was The Exploited’s cover, appropriately chosen for an Independence Day, of course. The Long Beach band has a Monday residency at the Echo in July, and the band’s sound is damned hard to write about.
With frontman Johnny Bell on bass and vocals, Andrew King on guitar, Cora Foxx on organ, Kevin Stuart on drums and Damian Edwards on percussion, they built a borderline cacophonic noise taking unexpected detours, changing abruptly its directions and leading to several rebirths. Johnny Bell’s raucous and savage vocals, which had some Eddie-Vedder-like-moments, and Cora Foxx’s very present wobbling and grooving organ carried the unclassifiable tunes, whereas Damian Edwards was doing his own show on percussion.
Yes, that guy was moving and following his own tune, like an exhibitionist dancer he was removing his clothes one by one, ending up in boxers toward the end of the set. And there was a little bit of that idea for the whole band, as each of them seemed to pursue a personal path and the result on stage was an untamed animal roaring and kicking all over the place, a sort of hypnotic post-punk-garage-rock with a lot of noise and soul, a weird assemblage of moody songs that were sometimes developing a furious hiccup.
But that was my first live exposure to the band, and I could be totally wrong, because I was a little disconcerted after their set, trying to figure out what I had experienced… but it is a good thing, right?
Their new album ‘Two-Way Mirror’ will be released this month, and the artwork is by Raymond Pettibon just like the Black Flag’s covers; was it why Edwards was wearing an OFF! truck hat, and Keith Morris was DJing for the night?
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