May 17, 2009
Montclair, NJ
By Doktor John

These Portland-based indie rockers packed Montclair’s refurbished former movie palace, The Wellmont practically up to the last rows of the nose-bleed section during this metro-area stop on their current tour. The Wellmont has been resurrected as a classic venue for this kind of second-tier musical performance group in the past year, having lay in a dormant state of disuse for some time following its closure as a movie theater years ago. It’s nice and all that, but I can’t say that it really works.

When in the past there were motion pictures projected on an elevated screen, they were perhaps visible to the mezzanine and balcony patrons, but the slant of the stadium-style seating is such that the performers on stage are just below the horizon of bobbing heads seated in front of the viewer. If one of these buffoons in front decides to stand and gyrate or even to sit leaning forward for the duration, the entire section behind the inconsiderate boor is blocked from seeing the show.

Opening was a sincere but generic Southern rock band with a kind of Louisiana/Celtic flavor named Delta Spirit. They were well received, perhaps in part because of the unexpected appeal of the garbage can lid-banging and mega-decibel bass drum pounding.
The Shins put on 2 full hours of their music unique for its strange, eccentric melodies, syncopated rhythms and above all for frontman James Russell Mercer’s piercing tenor. Reminiscent of the plaintive, happy-yet-sad vocal style of Robert Smith of the Cure, Mercer has the ability to make every lyric tug at the emotions of the listener, and to imbue each song with a level of profundity unmatched in the alternative music scene. Popular pieces from the second album predominated along with such favorites off “Wincing the Night Away” as “Sea Legs,” “Phantom Limb” and “Australia.”

A cover of The Beach Boys was okay, but a melody-less number by The Mumps clashed with the Shins’ style, and it was a major miscalculation include it in the encore set where it produced an anti-climactic let-down.

Their performance style is far heavier and harder rock than ever is heard on their recordings, and it’s not all that pleasing for Mercer to strain and waste his exquisite voice with yelling or for the accompanists to grunge it up like Smashing Pumpkins. The mellow, folksy sound of the Shins was disappointingly tossed aside during overly enthusiastic, noisy, speeded-up versions of their favorites. The material itself is unquestionably great, original and among the best alternative rock around, but it didn’t always get the reverential treatment it deserved.

May 29, 2009
Philadelphia PA
By Doktor John

This Brooklyn-based quintet is easily recognized by their manner as originally from the Midwest—Ohio to be specific. Although now signed on the Beggars Banquet label, they retain an offbeat, creative, indie style. They came on stage joined by a small brass section bringing their number to nine and opened with a truly beautiful number in the unmistakable signature sound that The National has made its own— warm, melodious, thoughtful and original. Then, without interruption went right into “Start a War,” beloved by their fans who were clearly anticipating it.

The audience of mainly clean-cut collegians was surprisingly interspersed with many white-haired elders. This is music with appeal to a variety of tastes. Front man Matt Berninger— lanky, casual, in a tie and suit —was the perfect image of an intellectual grad student. His smooth baritone vocals usually deliver the introspective, poetic lyrics in a halting, conversational style. It soon became clear however that this night they intended to perform heavy, super-charged versions of their hits. Although The National is identified with a mellow, soft-rock style, on this occasion they raised the tempo and the decibel level, aided by a massive baritone sax, a trombone and a trumpet which accompanied the electric guitar-based regulars, imparting an ultra-heavy, deep bass quality to such ordinarily sedate songs as Slow Show and City Middle.

Long and hard-rocking instrumental interludes grew into oscillating, reverberating crescendos of rhythmic feedback. The rapidly paced “Abel” transformed into a furious, driving anthem. Berninger’s casual attire and demeanor became increasingly rowdy, as he and the songs underwent a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation into vehement hard rockers. The well-behaved crowd held back from an unruly behavior. The only thing that resembled a mosh pit was on stage, where Berninger wantonly flailed both himself and his sound equipment around.

Some new songs were mingled in, but most of the set came from the two great albums, Alligator and Boxer. After about 15 songs, which included Secret Meeting and Squalor Victoria, they took a brief break but were promptly pulled back on stage by the enthusiastic audience for another set of three or four encores, among which was the agitated and catchy Mr. November. Exhausted and drenched in sweat, Berninger smashed his mike, and they closed the show with fond farewells to the audience.

This is THE seminal band that spawned the whole Industrial Music phenomenon back in the 70s. I had despaired of ever seeing these legendary characters live, so when they announced this resurrection, I jumped at the opportunity. My son Dan and I attended on a Thursday night and we ran into some die-hard fans and my editor, the estimable Patrick Slevin who requested me to pen the following report. We also rubbed elbows with some pretty interesting people in the “inner sanctum” of the all-African-American Brooklyn Masonic Temple. I can’t help wondering what THEY thought of Throbbing Gristle!

I heard one dude asking a tattooed, pierced and orange-haired punk chick: “So tell me, do you ever listen to jazz or blues?
The review below appears in the May 20 edition of The Aquarian Arts & Music Weekly.

Throbbing Gristle / Brooklyn Masonic Temple/ April 16, 2009
By Doktor John
Brooklyn, NY

This enigmatic, bizarre performance art and recording foursome has been revived several times since officially disbanding in 1981 following four years of iconoclastic activities and after spawning a whole new category of, not just music, but culture known as “Industrial.” Although senior citizens—side-projects and sex-changes behind them— having witnessed commercial bands take Industrial Music to fantastic heights of artistry, TG is still able to recreate the sound and fury if not the spark of radical subversion that made them the founders of this movement.

Prior to their stage performance this Thursday night they hosted a screening of their hour-long motion picture, “In the Shadow of the Sun” (1984) which, while somewhat dated, proved to be emblematic of both TG and the era from which they arose. The sound track they provided for this non-narrative, grainy, over-exposed, “artsy” film consisted mainly of loud, slowly evolving, rhythmic, electronic reverberations. Shadowy silhouetted figures moved in flickering slow motion against stark industrial backgrounds or poorly defined scenes of destruction. Double exposure allowed bright red images of flames or roaring fires to be layered over serene landscapes suggesting a hell-on-earth. Close-ups of an effeminate man grooming or a single finger pecking deliberately at a typewriter made repeated appearance between shots of grit and grime. Any number of dazzlingly bright backgrounds with dark figures in the foreground might have been the title images. An hour was about enough to get the idea and then some.

At 11 PM the musicians were welcomed on stage with loving enthusiasm by middle-aged industrial freaks and with bewildered admiration by youngsters who weren’t yet born when TG tried to overthrow the order of civilization and the music industry in the late 70s. Vocalist Genesis P- Orridge has by now become a glamorous but matronly transsexual, flaunting a platinum pageboy hairdo and collagen-enhanced feminine features, but with the rage and ferocity usually identified with a male frontman.
“Very Friendly,” the opener, consisted of a 15 minute narrative that turns gory, delivered in a bizarre manor over a repetitive rhythmic track of mainly electronic static produced by the efforts of bathrobe-clad “Sleazy” Christopherson and Chris Carter, and with the aid of Cosey Fanni Tutti abusing her guitar.

Other entries in the uninterrupted hour-long set included “Almost a Kiss” and “What a Day,” and other pieces with mesmerizing mechanical and, at times, tribal beats. The set ended with the chaotic, deranged “Discipline,” with no less a pounding, crashing yet hypnotic rhythm, over which P-Orridge repeatedly screamed the word “Discipline.”

Fans of Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, KMFDM, Front 242 and Frontline Assembly: Throbbing Gristle was the originator and creator before which all should bow down in worship!

Goth Dancer
Acrylic on canvas 24″ X 36″

This is a recent (2009) painting based upon my observations, during the past 18 yers, of beautiful dancers at clubs of the gothic-industrial scene in NY/NJ. This particular beauty was a prominent scene figure frequently present at various clubs in northern NJ, noted for her exceptional dancing skills. Here she appears in her most feminine persona. At other times she could be seen in tough attire and punkish, flat work boots.

24″ X 30″ Acrylic on canvas—Opera stage scene featuring miniature portraits of Luciano Pavarotti and Ghena Dimitrova. Ownership: Anna Maria Andriulli Ambrose

This is my most elaborately detailed painting ever, and it is based upon, or inspired by, movie-director Franco Zeffirelli’s set design for the Metropolitan Opera production of Puccini’s “Turandot.”

This scene is a fantasy set at the court of the emperor of China in a legendary time. The set as portrayed in this painting is modified and abbreviated, leaving out repetitive elements of Zeffirelli’s design. Furthermore, Pavarotti never sang in this Metropolitan Opera production, but I put him into the costume of the lead tenor vocalist playing the part of Calaf.

Dimitrova, on the other hand, was definitely cast in this role in the title role of Turandot. The painting was executed in 1989 as a gift to my late brother David, the world’s greatest authority on lyric opera that ever lived. Since 2003, it has passed to the hands of his widow, Anna Maria.

24″ X 36″ acrylic on canvas, in rough-hewn wooden frame with iron corner brackets and collage of historic paper flyers

The famous music establishment and New York landmark closed its doors in October 2006, thirty-three years after opening. It had been the “Ground Zero” of punk and New Wave in the U.S.A., having presented such iconic bands as Blondie, The Talking Heads and the Ramones. In its later years, the 1990s and 2000s, when we got to frequent CBGB’s it was more associated with local bands, parties, Miss Gothic NYC Pageants and aspiring, never-to-be-seen-or-heard-from-again punk rockers from around the country who could now and forever recount to their friends, their future children and grandchildren that they had once played at CBGB’s. The biggest name we were fortunate to catch was Patti Smith— in the revival phase of her career when she performed one Halloween night around 1999.

We will never forget the gracious hostess Althea, performances by The Empire Hideous, Ninth House, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, the wit and wisdom of Voltaire, the walls papered with promotional announcement fliers, the door-less, seat-less toilets, the mohawk-tressed punks and the elaborately-clad Goth kids whose attire blended indistinguishably with the nightmarish Halloween costumes of party-goers.

It is to these— and all the others who made CBGB’s that special place—that this art-work is dedicated.

Laibach performed at the Fillmore, previously known as Irving Plaza, on the local stop of what one can only hope is their last-ever tour. Once an industrial music giant with such unique power and influence as to have actually hastened the break-up of the nation of Yugoslavia, Laibach has become a mere parody of itself. In that sense, parody of a parody.

In the bad old days of the Cold War, before the dissolution of the USSR, Yugoslavia was a stand-alone fascistic, Marxist conglomerate of five or six captive Slavic nations, a sort of mini-USSR under the rule of their own Stalinist dictator, Marshall Tito. Laibach was part of a Slovenian art movement that helped provoke rebelliousness against the regime by reinterpreting popular music (they were above all, a cover band) with bombastic, militaristic style. Knowing observers realized they were subversively mocking the totalitarian forms they were mimicking with their glorification of the state, the nation and the soil. But it was too clever for the communist authorities to see through or, in any event, to censor or suppress.

Unfortunately, in its declining third decade, Laibach by now has grossly overplayed that one theme, namely pretending to celebrate militarism and nationalism in order to oppose them. They have dwindled down to just one original member, Milan Fras, the front-man with the ultra-deep bass voice and a female vocalist whose talent is wasted on ineffectively groping for non-existent melodies. Having abandoned the practice of covering and reinterpreting other people’s songs, they clearly are not up to the task of writing original music.

As a means of disguising their boring, percussive music, they have created an elaborate background show, also uninspired, featuring paired screens on which are projected various, mostly uninteresting images of flags, symbols, words and, stupidly, the film credits for two 60s era, black-and-white Italian movies.

Doors were at 8 PM. There were no opening bands. Instead the audience of nostalgia-seeking industrial music freaks was made to stand around until 9:45 at which time the filler videos and DJ music stopped. What followed was another 20 tedious minutes of outright, intentional abuse: Being forced to stare at an empty stage and listen to bombastic, Slavic, martial choral songs— seven in all!
Next was the Star-Spangled Banner, played straight yet with hidden contempt, displaying the American flag in video on two screens with its stars replaced by the new Laibach symbol, a stylized, winged letter “V” which would appear again and again in the graphics throughout the show.
Their entrance on stage was a shocking disappointment for those expecting the familiar cadre of uniformed, stone-faced musicians. Only the charismatic Milan Fras, bearded and wearing his signature headdress, is left of the original group, accompanied by a turbaned female vocalist, Mina Spiler plus a drummer and some electronic accompanists.

Laibach’s work remains reasonably relevant and retains some merit only when addressing the political and cultural issues of the Slavic peoples. Two songs in the show did just that, but of these, only one, “Rossiya”
succeeded in bringing back that brilliant, ambiguous irony when, with mock-sincerity, Laibach sings of the peoples of Eastern Europe as “united and free in great Mother Russia’s embrace.” Coincidentally, it is the only song with a memorable melody.

There wasn’t much irony, and even less insight when Laibach stumbled far out of their element to perform abstruse audiovisual critiques of the U.S.A., Israel, China, Japan, Italy and Spain, using that same worn-out ploy: faked admiration. Thus they parodied Spanish pride over conquistadores and they made oblique reference to Mussolini’s plans for a resurgent Rome. Is this stuff supposed to be relevant? China got ridiculed with the slogan “Arise,” repeated endlessly. And Japan’s lame spoof had something to do with a wavering image of the sun on the two screens. You get the idea: “Nationalism is bad.” We hear you.

As it appears in The Aquarian June 10 Issue