Like Dancing About Architecture

Like Dancing About Architecture, Vol. VII

Tonight’s Episode: Ladytron with CSS

October 18, 2006, The BellyUp, Solana Beach, CA

It’s been a long, long time since the last entry. I dropped the ball on the second Metric show we saw at House of Blues back in January, and the TV On The Radio show at the Casbah in the spring. Nothing said, but not much to say, either. And I haven’t been to see live music since, because I am lame.

Tonight’s episode was brought to us care of YouTube. I am usually the last to get on board with these internet innovations, and so just discovered this site about a month ago. It’s awesome and a bit unsettling to be able to reach back and relive any life you want. I’m at Talking Heads live in 1978! I’m on the Anarchy in the U.K. tour with the Buzzcocks! It’s Sleater-Kinney on Letterman. Yowzah! In just such a fit of voyeurism I noticed a sidebar item I couldn’t resist: a music video by some band called CSS, doing the song “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above.” Who could say no to such a request? One click and I was sucked in to a simple, jouncy contrapuntal guitar rhythm against a sparse beat, watching a bunch of tiny Brazilian women and one mustachioed Brazilian man bump their shoulders up and down while dancing with a stick puppet of a bedsheet ghost. I watched it again. It was sweet. I wanted to make love and listen to Death From Above 1979, those fantastic hardcore mavens who sound nothing like this band. I wanted to see what CSS was all about, which predicated this trip to the BellyUp with Art, Vera and Jackie to see them open for Ladytron.

CSS, or Cansei de Ser Sexy (apparently = “Tired of being sexy” in Portuguese), seems to have been plucked from the Sao Paolo party band scene by SubPop records to balance their otherwise retro-chic angry white boy pop line-up. There are six: two guitars, bass, drums, synth/guitar, and lead singer Ladyfoxx. They were all packed in to a slice of downstage, as there was a second drum kit on a raised platform upstage which must have been verboten. I was surprised to see Moustache Man open on drums, since in the video he was playing guitar, but my curiosity was later resolved because they SWITCH instruments! Gee wow. We were lucky enough to grab some actual seats, with a table even, in a raised separated area stage left which I always thought was reserved for VIPs, so we watched the proceedings directly from the side. This turned out to be a good thing, because the place filled up and there was no need to stand in the crowd for this show. All of the songs could be described like this: chunga-chunga-chunga-chunga. For her part, Ladyfoxx did her best to hop around and engage the audience, even body surfing at one point, despite an alleged illness. She doesn’t sing so much as chant, but is so affable that it makes you want to like this otherwise unimpressive band. As a whole, they came across like a fun party band that has been given a boost above their station before they’re really ready. Frankly, I like that she calls herself “Ladyfoxx” even though she looks just like a normal person. They saved their break-out hit till the end, and the live version stuck to the party band feel, which was unfortunate. The guitars and drums were mixed so high that the sweetness was gone. What had been a cute, pokey little number became another rocknroll hairball coughed up for the bouncing hordes. I still like the video, though.

Now…behold! Ladytron! The most accurately-named band since Musical Youth and the Average White Band! Ladytron’s recordings sound exactly like a band named Ladytron should sound: part Lady, part Tron. They are, on paper, a boy-girl quartet from Liverpool comprising at least one person from Milan and one from Sofia. On stage they added a bass player and a drummer, and everyone wore black. All black, like the Spinal Tap album cover. For their set the CSS gear was removed and replaced with at least four Korg synthesizers upstage, wrapped around the aforementioned raised drum kit. Downstage was occupied by the Bulgarian synth player with $80 peyes, and the Lady herself – I guess their tour is all about the Ladies, the Ladies. I had hoped to feel a connection with this band live, at least because we all belong to the Society of Anachronistic, Asymmetrical Haircuts. The Liverpudlian synth/guitar player was a dead ringer for my cousin Fred in his 1976 wedding photo. Sadly, the band did not connect with the audience at all. In interviews one of them has pointed to Krautrock bands like Neu! and Can as major influences, because they like the idea of the listener being unable to identify the source of synthetic sounds as you would with traditional instruments. This idea comes out in their recordings – that’s the Tron part, and it adds the most interest to their sound. They work as a studio band because the Lady part fits with this Tron part. It worked for the old Krautrockers because that top-of-the-throat Teutonic voice sounded electronic. Same goes for Devo. With Ladytron, the unwavering, emotionless drive of her echoed voice glides above the techtonic Korg sound. This droll technique is an ironic setting for topics of the heart, but they’ve applied it to a whole cannon of songs about the sadness and loneliness that lies at the heart of promiscuity. You can even hear it in the titles, like “Playgirl”, “Jet Age”, “He Took Her To a Movie”, and “Another Breakfast With You”. Yeah, the songs all sound the same after a while, but it’s more like a motif. So with all this, I wanted them to reach out to us in performance. Instead we got an hour of bland stoicism. The Lady herself, looking like a short-cropped Morticia Addams, could be a powerful performer. Watching her from her left shoulder, she might have had the bottled intensity of a richly painted hieroglyph. But like a painting, she didn’t actually move. It seemed silly that CSS, with all of Ladyfoxx’s energy, was cramped into this space, now wide open, of which Ladytron made such poor use. She barely looked at the audience most of the time, deciding instead to study the rafters above us. The Korg players stayed put, and the bassist looked bored out of her skull. The rear projection video, sometimes of the Lady in quasi-simultaneous slo-mo, was fine but only accentuated the lackluster performance. They also had a smoke machine and strobe lights (which, being on the side of the stage, we got right in the eye). For reals. These are the trappings of electronic bands, obsessed with inventing sounds above music and performance. Art pointed out that he knows of one such band who met over their shared interest in collecting synthesizers. And so it seemed for this band. The new songs sounded just like the old ones, and all of them sounded bland here, due in part to the mixing, which brought out the drums but drowned out any subtleties in the other instruments, if they were even there. If I squinted real hard and focused on the bassist’s fingers, I could sometimes make out the lines. And, you know, there are many ways to turn recorded tracks into performance pieces, but look, turning up the sirens on your synthesizer for a minute-and-a-half of wall-of-sound drum fill-ins at the end of the tune does not count as expanding the song, even if it elevates all present to a state of rapture/deafness. Most of the audience was enrapt most of the time, particularly the huge bear of a man in front of us who looked like he misread the location for the Motorhead show. During breaks his arms shot out in a giant Y so he could yell “DESTROY!!!!!” But he stayed in his seat because, as he told Vera, he didn’t want to block our view. When it was over he gave us all high tens, and the band left for just enough time for one round of the Hokey Pokey before returning for the obligatory encore. The first song in this set, “Send Me a Postcard” from 2003’s “Softcore Jukebox” album, was terrific live. It drove like a train engine and had great hooks, and for once Lady sang and danced to the audience like she really meant it. I do wish there had been more of that. In the end, the tenor was best summed up by three quotes from my companions:

Vera: “What’s with all the strobe lights?” Indeed.

Jackie: “So they’re like Metric, but less interesting.” Check.

Art: “I’m really sick of pop music.” Here, here.

It’s time to get back to music, folks. I’m taking a hiatus from pop, too. We all want inspiration. SubPop gave it to us long ago with Nirvana, and this is what they’re giving us now. It will come again, from some un-glamorous corner of the world. Until then, we have to bounce.