What does it say about a band if you shout out the names of many other bands to describe their music without totally been satisfied with the description? I suppose it is a good thing, it tells you how hybrid and multifaceted their sound is and how unique it is at the same time.
On Thursday night, just before Disappears’ performance at the Echo, I saw a guy wearing a Neu t-shirt getting closer to the stage, it totally made sense, but if Krautrock is surely an element of the Chicago band's sound, there are many more elements in their sonic palette.
They precisely opened with the krautrock-y ‘Replicate’ off their new album ‘Pre Language’, giving the tone, with this monster-pounding drumming played by ex Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley, and this hypnotic melody, that carries you away and empowers you after a few riffs coming from two busy and mighty guitars played by Brian Case, Jonathan van Herik, and a bass played by Damon Carruesco.
With a lot of reverb in the vocals, Brian Case had the morose delivery of a Mark E. Smith (hey, I also saw someone wearing a The Fall t-shirt!) and the aggressive-badass delivery of a Iggy Pop singing ‘I wanna be your Dog’ in repeat. You didn’t care if the lyrics were undecipherable most of the time, since everything was in the tone.
And when I said that Steve Shelley was pounding hard on his drum set, it was not a joke, as it was not staying in place which made all of them ask at one point if someone in the crowd had a brick to stall the damn thing!
If some songs were repetitive, none of them was boring, rather they were taking unexpected detours, flashing back in my mind stuff from Beck, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Bauhaus-Interpol, with busier guitar at every song, producing a noisier and more distorted result each time, sometimes with Case launching these little ‘woohs’ just like singer of Thee Oh Sees does at the end of a dense-trance episode.
They played a lot of new material off their upcoming album, often without even stopping between the songs, barely digging in their back catalogue, with the exception of the very badass krautrock ‘Magics’, and a few other songs.
If their music has been sometimes qualified of shoegazing, they were nevertheless showing a lot of dynamism on stage, constantly moving toward and against each others, almost reenacting a drunken dream going slowly.
‘Joa’ had these shouted anxious vocals buried in alarmed-thundering guitars, ‘Hibernation Sickness’ had these musical swirls forming a stormy wall of noise (they had tons of pedals), ‘Fear of Darkness’ was producing this pulsating, paranoiac and intense ambiance, ‘Love Drug’ had a sort of dark psychedelia slowing burning into a storm of distortion.
The band formed in 2008 and ‘Pre Language is already their third album,… despite their moniker I don’t think they will vanish soon, actually I would not be surprised if they rather become more and more visible.
Setlist
Replicate
Pre language
Magics
Lux
JOA
Radiation
Era
Minor patterns
Fear of darkness
Hibernation Sickness
Love drug
Brother Joliene