Opening for Peter Hook and the Light at the El Rey theater on Friday night, was a Los Angeles band, working a little like the Black Keys, but their guitar/bass-drum duo has nothing to do with bluesy anthems, as they rather played intricate post-rock compositions with a lot of heavy looping and effect pedals.
The eyes were mostly on Kristian Dunn’s amazing ability to play his two-neck guitar, creating, with drummer Tim Fogarty, complex, dense and loud instrumental soundscapes, reminiscent of many things at the same time, with an upbeat and muscular delivery. They were producing layers and layers of sound carrying an electronica feeling, although Dunn said at mid-set that everything we were hearing was produced live, ‘No laptop, no trick, everything is live’, as if he wanted us to realize even more how astonishing all this was.
He was alternating between his double neck guitar/bass and another bass, seemingly playing several things at the same time, incorporating a lot of sounds that appeared to come from nowhere. I am not sure I was understanding everything that was going on, (actually I am sure I wasn’t) but the result was impressive, spectacular.
The music was almost geometrical, very mathematical and rather repetitive, but executed with a lot of energy, as Dunn was doing a dance-fight with his two-neck instrument, moving all the time, while Fogarty was framing their odd hard rocking numbers with an infectious and outstanding drumming. Were they only two on stage?
Their tracks were quite different one from another, going from distortion to crazy virtuoso finger tapping on the two necks, turning in circles or opening into other unexpected territories, surprisingly dance-inducing with bouncy rhythms and pulsating beats.
Although I am not sure what songs they played, but just looking at their discography reveals that some of their songs have really inventive and amusing titles like ‘The Sycophants Are Coming! The Sycophants Are Coming!’, ‘Ian Mackaye Was Right’, or ‘I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool’.
They also did their cover of Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ from their third album ‘These Promises Are Being Videotaped’, brilliantly demonstrating that their multifaceted compositions were not too distant from the UK band’s, except that they were playing in a much more playful way, in fact they seemed to have so much fun that it made me believe that El Ten Eleven is probably a band better to discover live than at home listening to one of their studio albums.