The Good News: A Place to Bury Strangers didn’t blow my ear drums. Even better news, they kicked so much ass. My experiences with APTBS has taken place at either their home turf of Death By Audio or a venue slightly larger. This was the first time I had seen them at a venue of this size. Usually when you go to APTBS show at Death By Audio, the lights are bright, flickering, and — dare I say it — even at times colorful. During some moments of their performance, the band was swathed in a coat of darkness lit only by a film collage projected over them, bringing down the tone of the atmosphere just enough to invite their audience into their ritual. I’m not trying to be cute by using the word “ritual.” I’ve written about the phenomena of their performance many times, stating that what they do is ritualistic like some violent Druid ceremony to heap worship and offerings to their gods. The thrashing of guitars, the wild-eyed look and the intensity of their sound is always refreshing to experience. It separates our world of social networks and computers and the one that is more attuned with the powers of sonic energy. It is a beautiful thing to witness and the band really proved themselves to be capable of headlining any show rather than opening one up.

The Bad News: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and The Kills just seemed kinda mismatched for this gig. Especially when the first band (APTBS) opens up with such ferocity. How does one follow an act like that? Maybe I didn’t drink enough or was too occupied with dodging photographers while entrenched in the pit. I don’t know. Either way, I was glad to see APTBS again.

FOR PICTURES OF THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART AND THE KILLS, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

Humanbeast
DJ Pieter Schoolwerth
Home Sweet Home
131 Chrystie St # 1
NY, NY

Wierd Records

Photos and Words by Carlos Detres

Yeah, I was excited to see Paris-based band, La Femme play at an obscure-looking loft space in Williamsburg. Their lead singer bailed to Paris on an emergency, leaving three of the band’s members behind to tear into 285 Kent. They looked like mechanical droids, pounding at keyboards, drums, and guitar string. Maybe the switching around they did with the instruments was unnecessary and distracting, but they were having a good time. The audience was most likely there for the Crystal Stilts. I was there for La Femme.

One of them said into the mic, with a Parisian accent “Tonight, we bring to you music for your pleasure.”

The rest of the night swarmed with life and energy so that’s why this isn’t a typical show review. It’s not even a show review. It’s a night of joy review and it’s dedicated to all of the people I met that night who never gave me shit for asking to taking their portraits. In fact, they seemed pretty glad about it.

It was like a greatest hits show without all of the albums and all of the filler.

Luis Vasquez (The Soft Moon) packed his debut album into his first show in New York City, playing to a crowd who had just stomped off clumps of snow from their boots and high heels.

An admission: I fucking loved The Soft Moon’s debut album, which came out in the Fall of 2010. I wrote a glowing review about it back in December. The music touched a nerve, which had grown out of a youthful necessity to attach to the music of the socially estranged. It was like hearing Bauhaus for the first time but different. It was like hearing Sisters of Mercy for the first time but different. Or Tones On Tail. Or Siouxie and the Banshees. It’s too obvious but I was excited to learn that the artist’s first show in New York City had been scheduled. I had to be there. I had to find that refreshment…that sound that hadn’t been so perfectly articulated for so many years. Not since…not since a long time.

The band came on a bit past midnight and a large crowd gathered after fighting through snow and cold to hear what The Soft Moon sounds like with a live PA. Vasquez and his touring band joined their instruments onstage. Everyone who was there, really wanted to be there and the excitement was met with the rumbling hum of synthesizer and the screams and whines of Vasquez’s guitar. They played through the entire album — band and audience sharing a room of mutual appreciation.

The Soft Moon’s set had its first success in a city that needs something new. There was a reason why the room was packed; why people waded through the snow, paid their five bucks, and crowded around the small stage. It’s one of those rare moments that people talk about after everyone has realized how important the message of an artist’s songs can be.

click on thumbnail to enlarge

In the midst of an extensive world tour, supporting their excellent debut album, Amoral, Violens made a return trip to the New York area with a set at Santos Party House on Saturday night. Their set along with their opening acts – Cavemen and the impressive electronica duo Light Asylum – was marred with some frustrating sound issues: the vocals and the bass, the instrument that really makes some of the best songs on Amoral were difficult to hear at times over the other instruments. Strangely, Violens either seemed a bit off or some of the material – songs such as “Trance Like Turn,” and “It Couldn’t Be Perceived” – don’t translate as well live, as they do on the album. Something seemed inexplicably missing during several songs and it carried through their set in some way. Despite these issues, I have to say that Violens’ songs are fantastic, atmospheric and at points, downright trippy. Much like their album they straddle that tightrope between the familiar and the brilliantly novel but I think I would have wanted a little bit more.

It’s like someone I spoke to recently about seeing A Place to Bury Strangers at Death By Audio — it really is an experience unlike many other moments in modern rock and roll. This is their home, their turf, close to the riverside of Williamsburg. The lackluster sheen of industrial brickwork and abandoned smokestacks jut from this mostly unremarkable side of town. It’s one of the few corners of Williamsburg that gets blurred in the transition from old immigrant status to gentrification. Continue following the train tracks across the bridge and you end up in the Lower East Side where the remnants of punk culture crumble into scenester purgatory. It’s good to know that there is such thing as a world renown band’s own living room becoming the scene of some of the grittiest rock and roll from the hipster bedlam of Brooklyn.

On Tuesday, October 26, the DIY space, Death By Audio, became the share cage — a transformed center for musical aggression that enables its audience to express enthusiasm by means of flailing legs, arms, heads, hair, and other limbs and parts, if available. The band’s performance hinged upon natural disregard to electronics, sometimes limited by the length of a cable. The visual of the room was like watching the insides of a machine, detaching itself from its technological cells and reaching out for its humanity.

An instance: A guitar cable snaps back onto the floor when bass player Dion Lunadon flung himself into the fray of the flesh-grabbing hands of his audience.

An impressive moment: Oliver Ackerman’s usual rage against the instruments, pulling out the strings, detuning his instrument then, out of the ugly beauty of a battered guitar, string hanging like unappealing fish lines, Ackerman began to strum the opening chords of one of the band’s new songs — one of three that APTBS pulled out of their magic hat that night.

Moments like these are special. Anyone who goes, who gets their shit stomped upon, their ribcage elbowed by a sweat-drenched maniac…anyone who arrives, checks their problems at the door, knows what this space proves.

A Place to Bury Strangers will be releasing a new EP on November 22, 2010. Here’s a preview.

Blue skies, white swollen clouds drifted endlessly to the west and beneath this glorious pastiche of normalcy, a horde gathered at Kennedy’s to enact a day long tribute to that great genre of horror, which began with Night of the Living Dead way back in 1968.

Zombie films were a little different than all of the other films of this genre. Lifeless drones ambling toward an insatiable appetite, as infinite as death itself, have always been the a stripped down reflection of us; ugly in our desires and empty as a hungry ghost. The organizers cleverly utilized a political theme as you’ll be able to see in the pictures below. The occupants of the Time Warner building are still cleaning up after we ransacked it. For one day these zombies had a free pass to the city. The police just stood aside, unsure what to do. I took pictures, smiling from ear to ear — the happiest among the undead.

Big hugs go out to my zombie friends. I didn’t black out this time! Hooray!

Photo by Carlos "Doom and Gloom" Detres

Goodness, me. So we’re back to our favorite time, month, holiday, etc. of the year — Halloween. According to our best estimates, you guys really dug last year’s Halloween issue so that means you’ll probably dig this year’s. We have more writers and photographers who are committed to displaying some of their pagan-esque knowledge. It may be a little darker this time; more real.

If you live in NYC or will be visiting, we’ll have the info on our city’s best haunted house attractions. We’ve been to at least one…all we can say is that you have a lot to look forward to from visiting them.

If anyone has a horror story they’d like to submit, now’s the time. Do it! Anyway, best wishes on this glorious month.

Peace and decay,

The Whiskey Dregs

Sophie’s choice

That’s how I felt selecting these pictures — should I go with movement, action, and mayhem? Or should I go with cookie cutter pictures of a band, whose sound deserves more than concert portraiture. There’s the right way of doing things and then there’s our (The Whiskey Dregs) way of doing things. I guess maybe it wasn’t Sophie’s choice after all. When you’re getting smashed between the stage, girls fighting to kiss each other, and legs kicking the body of your camera, you realize real quick that photographing a show like this one isn’t going to be about about photography at all, it’s going to be about freezing the moment so everyone can experience some semblance of quite possibly one of the best shows this year.

Fuck cookie cutter concert portraiture.