Not long ago, I joked about subletting my apartment and just moving into 285 Kent since I have been spending so much time there, and will be spending more time there in the near, near future thanks to the venue’s constant stream of awesome lineups. Thursday night found me back at the DIY space for noise wizards Lightning Bolt. It had been nearly a decade (!) since I’d seen them last, but in my early college days bands like this were my bread and butter, and Lightning Bolt had always represented the most mind-blowing talent of the bunch.
I got there just as controversial punk rockers Liquor Store were finishing up. Their sound was actually pretty straight forward and they played it well enough; the controversy comes from their possible involvement in Jay Reatard’s 2010 death. They’re from New Jersey and play shows here all time. If you’re ever in the mood to get beaten up you should go to one of their shows and ask them directly if they know what happened that night in January.
It was around this time that something happened at 285 Kent I’ve never observed until then – a disembodied voice from the sound booth rang over the crowd with some “announcements” regarding where folks could smoke (outside only, although the voice did specify tobacco) and that no one should be taking beer outside due to the cop circling the venue in a golf cart waiting to catch people for peeing in the street. Really? Why do these things need to be stated? I get that it’s a very raw space and that there are plenty of morons who think that means there are no rules, or believe themselves to be such badasses that whatever rules there may be don’t apply to to them, but it sucks that 285 even had to say it. People should just know how to behave themselves so everyone has a good time at a show, no matter how raucous it gets. And everyone should be more respectful of the neighborhoods that house these venues, so said venues don’t get shut down, so shows and crazy raves (or whatever) can keep happening. GEEZ.
Indian Jewelry took the stage after a brief equipment change. The Houston four-piece also play a genre-bending brand of distortion-drenched rock, but take more cues from psychedelic and industrial music than the headliners. It was perhaps for that reason that some completely ill-mannered jerk-offs in the audience decided to heckle the quartet with some extremely insightful chants of “You SUCK!!!” For what it’s worth, there were also some ill-mannered jerkoffs on the other end of the spectrum – some idiots who loved the band so much they flailed about in the audience like windchimes in a hurricane, flinging gross sweat everywhere and elbowing folks nearby. I finally found an area unmarred by stupidity and actually enjoyed Indian Jewelry’s set.
I’ve listed to and enjoyed their records for years but had never seen them live, and it was quite the sight to behold – that is, if your eyeballs could handle it. Before their set they shut off all the stage lighting and turned on a seizure-inducing strobe light. It flashed bright white to black, bright white to black, through the hour long set, making the musicians on stage look like marionettes animated in stop-motion. Erika Thrasher and Tex Kerschen divvied vocal duties, both fronting the band with plenty of sass, swapping keys and guitar intermittently. A dreadlocked drummer furiously pounded a stripped-down kit at the front of the stage, while a very blonde bassist donned sunglasses, presumably so that he didn’t go into epileptic convulsions.
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The band has been playing lots of shows in the New York area lately, presumably to generate buzz for Peel It, a new album slated to drop sometime this fall. If the live show and the teasers they’ve released are any indication, it will see the band straying further from their psychedelic beginnings into a dancier post-punk realm while continuing to push experimental boundaries. The truly great thing about Indian Jewelry is that they just don’t seem to care about playing by rules; they’ll do whatever, say whatever, stray from whatever convention, even if it’s viewed negatively. As Kerschen warned the hecklers: “Every time you tell us we suck, we’ll just play another song.” That self-possessed, devil-may-care kind of determination is pretty admirable, and to me sums up what Indian Jewelry is all about.
Lightning Bolt is known for setting up and taking a stage just moments after their openers play, taking the audience by surprise. But that wasn’t the case for this show; it seemed to take longer than usual to set up two towers of precariously stacked amps (one of which had a cartoony, acid-trip sort of face painted on it), Brian Chippendale’s drum set (which despite being covered with Spongebob Squarepants stickers was about to take plenty of abuse) and, most challenging of all, to get everything running electrically. For what it’s worth, the Bolt guys seemed just as antsy to get the show on the road. But before that could happen, the 285 folks made another public service announcement, this time regarding pit etiquette (“If someone falls down in the pit, what do we doooooooo? We PICK THEM uuuuuuuup!”). The audience, whether due to short attention spans or all-out cult worship, were reveling in every stray note while the band worked out the electrical issues, with Chippendale apologizing. Someone yelled out a request for “13 Monsters” which garnered disbelieving laughs from the band. Finally, Chippendale pulled on his Mexican-wrestler-esque face mask (which houses a microphone so he could play hands-free) and the show got underway.
From the first shredded rhythms of Brian Gibson’s bass, the crowd was churning. Distorted waves of noise issued from his instrument; it’s almost unfathomable that it’s only one guy playing one bass. People climbed the interior supports of the cavernous venue for a better look at the virtuosity, rivers of sweat poured from every gland on stage and off. Both guys play at a feverish pace, and while it looks far from effortless it’s simply incredible to behold. Beholding the spectacle was challenging in and of itself since the electrical circuits kept overloading, effectively shutting off every light and amp in the venue so that only Chippendale’s drumming could be heard. Ever the problem solver, he suggested the band somehow plug into the sole string of Christmas lights that remained lit when the rest of the venue’s power had failed. The problems were sporadic but ongoing through the first part of the set, at which time Todd P came to the rescue. He was showered with accolades and all but compared to God by Chippendale, who stopped the show only once more when someone in the audience lost a wedding ring (it was quickly located, but made me feel a little old; ten years ago there were few wedding rings at Lightning Bolt shows).
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The band ripped through a blistering selection of old and new material, leaving the stage only briefly before returning to encore with “Dead Cowboy”. Chippendale had been somewhere in the crowd and emerged smudged with filth, his left arm dripping blood. When he noticed that this was so, his reaction was to smear that blood all over his face, put his mic back in his mouth, and hammer through the last song. Lightning Bolt’s method of performing is so physically intense you almost feel bad cheering for an encore; it’s like asking someone who just ran a marathon to jog another few blocks. I’d been standing against a wall close to the stage to avoid the chaos, feeling vibrations from the amps move through my body like thunder. I hadn’t moved much but I was still damp since the air was made humid by everyone’s sweat. I thought back to the days when I would willingly give myself whiplash at shows like this, getting pummeled, getting my hair pulled. Even if those days are gone, the energy and intensity that Lightning Bolt put into their shows hasn’t slowed a bit, and it’s good to know they’ve still got it.
