Eulogy for Rocks, Sacrosanct goes out with a Bang
We cringe through a full minute of dead-key atonal static and the kind of raw, red distortion that makes the owners of clubs and their large, expensive speakers weep tears of runny little dollar signs. This is how W.A.S.T.E. shakes hands with their captive audience. This is when she calls me cooler than frozen peas and dares me to include that line in this review.
When the actual show begins, it is an assault of heavy bass and the kind of simple, throbbing rhythm that functions as the perfect soundtrack for a carpet bombing.
It’s not just two guys with keyboards. It’s not even just two guys with keyboards bobbing their heads to completely different rhythms. It’s two guys with keyboards bobbing their heads to two completely different Industrial rhythms. This is modern industrial music. The kind of stompy, thumping, wall-shaking fuck-kill, brainsmasher music that puts a smile on the face of every adolescent shithead who ever waited until they were out of eashot before they said, “Fuck you, dad,” and help up his black-nailed middle finger at pop culture.
It may seem like I’m about to start talking shit about Industrial music, and that’s probably because I am. Shamelessly and relentlessly, in point of fact. But I also respect it, in my own backwards mutant sort of way. Because Industrial has, as a genre, staged one of the greatest coups in the history of rock music-which is made doubly fascinating by merit of it’s being a retro-coup...much like a retro-virus in many ways, which is to say that Industrial music is very much like AIDS in at least a few key regards. Industrial music allows socially inept people who don’t want to talk to other people or present things to crowds or introduce things...and, pretty much want nothing more than to hide behind smoke, equipment and a thick black curtain, wearing those ungodly huge bulletproof headphones so they can pretend like they don’t hear your insipid nattering. Being an industrial artist lets you stand behind a keyboard, never say a word, barely be seen, never get recognized and still be a Rock Star. How cool is that? And that’s the coup. I consider it a retro-coup because this is essentially the same dream and demeanor as the progenitors of much of classical music. Showy drama queens (read: Mozart) aside, my understanding is that Georges Bizet was very much like an Industrial Musician. No, seriously. Look at his picture on wikipedia. That’s what an Industrial musician would have looked like back in 1850. Would you recognize Sergei Rachmaninoff is you bumped into him on the street? Do you even know who or what a Rachmaninoff is? Who the shit am I even writing for, anymore? Who are you people? Who am I?
Don’t like public speaking? SIMPLE! Just comb every video in your local Blockbuster for an easily repeatable quote of approximately ten seconds and containing some sort of ominous message, sarcasm, quip, joke or deep-steated irony. Add ooncha-ooncha noise. Add Darth Vader breathing sound racked up to a ten on the lo-fi distort-o-meter. Add more ooncha-ooncha noise, but up the tempo by three. Add missile-firing sound effects. Repeat over and over one half-second of the sample layered over yet more ooncha-ooncha. Alternate the half-second sample and the ooncha. More missiles. Finish with another line from the same sample movie. The next line in the movie, if possible, but really any line, so long as it’s amusing. My personal choice would be to use the movie Snatch-open with the, “And here I am…and what the hell do I know about Diamonds?” and the end of the song pays off with, “Don’t they come from Antwerp?” The ½ second clip throughout the song would be, “How we comin’ with those sausages, Charlie?” and pared down to simply, “sausages,” for super-fast repeatability. The sequel to this song will begin with Brick Top’s speech about the definition of Nemesis, quote “Goody Gumdrops” for the half-second repeater and end with, “in the quiet words of the virgin mary-come again?” Give me about 3 hours and I can come up with another 8 tracks, all using quotes from the movie Snatch, and now I have a Concept Album...ooo! Voila. Rock Star.
And again, it sounds like I’m talking smack about this band. Bizarrely, I’m actually not. I like W.A.S.T.E. Quite a bit, in point of fact, but there’s unfortunately quite little to say here. They have a little stage presence with the whole bobbing of the head thing, but that’s a pretty dead-end subject. Their lyrics aren’t much to write home about, on account of that whole not-existing thing, and one song is fundamentally very much like another. I could write, “And then we launched into the third song. This one had missile sounds, some very emphatic head-bobbing and a 135 bpm tempo. Much harder than their early 134 bpm work, which I felt was quite lackluster and could really have done with some balls.” So, instead, I’m going to take the Mick out of the Industrial genre for 500ish words. Because I’m an electric bastard.
Now they’re done and we’re waiting for Synthetic Nightmare.
I have made, tonight, the perfectly sober, informed decision to write essentially not a single word about the Synthetic Nightmare show. I’ve seen them perform maybe half a dozen times in various incarnations and line-ups of singers and guitarists. And I like them. Generally always have, though certainly moreso since the changing of the singers to Fabian and yet moreso still since the addition of their most recent guitarist, the incomparable Will ‘Rat Bastard’ Evans. And I like them. Always have and probably will continue to o so for the foreseeable future. But I’ve written them up at least twice and can really only write but so much about a band before I run out of shit to say. Which is importantly aggravating at the moment, because Will is pressing me to write a compare and contrast about the band’s shows pre-him as opposed to him-inclusive…which would be based on hazy and beer-sprinkled memories from like three months ago when they opened for Thrill Kill.
But the staples are there. I can always say that. Do they have stage presence? Of fucking course they do. Do Will and Nick, as always, completely forget where they parked the stage and wander around for a while, thrusting their guitar-bearing pelvises at unwary concert-goers? Of fucking course they do. Do the girls all faint and the boys all cry when Fabian’s junk gets perfectly outlined by his paint-thin non-trousers? Of fucking course they do. Do Nick and Will manage to each take a shot mid-song and keep going? I’m just tired of saying it, now. Because this is Synthetic God Damned Nightmare, and they are consummate professionals. Power Metal? No. Industrial? Not quite. Industro-Power Alcoholism? Yep. That’s the one.
Alter der Ruine starts when I’m not paying any attention, as I was busily watching people undesirably hitting on my friend, Sorrel, and having a wonderful commiserating laugh at her expense. So I’m going to have to try to play a bit of catch-up…which isn’t going to be easy, because these fucking guys are FAST. Their first song is a turbo-charged electronic bullet-train, speeding along precise lines like Blaine the Mono-fast enough to rip the skin off any deer with the bad luck to graze within a hundred yards. And while not quite every song is this fast or heavy-they slow down considerably for the second track to let us catch our breath-it bears mention that every song is at least as awesome. Alter der Ruine manages to climb almost instantly with the first few seconds of every song, find a sort of manic, kinetic, hypertrophic intensity, plateau there and maintain for as long as they feel they need to or want to. Every time another song ends, the disappointment is writ across the faces of every frantic dancing madman on the floor who claps but secretly wants to scream, “what’d ya stop for?” This contends for face-space as clearly as the inescapable exhaustion they are inspired unavoidably to drive themselves full-bore, pedal-to-the-metal towards. Then the next song begins to an exclaimed facial chorus somewhere between, ‘yay’ and, ‘here we go again.’ But they keep moving. They just keep moving because they have to. They’ve got their dancin’ shoes on and these kids are going to boogaloo until they puke and nothing can stop them.
Once again, however, this is a band with no lyrics, whose stage presence involves the vast array of electronic doo-dads behind which they hide, and for whom one song is, fundamentally, very much like another from a writer/reviewer perspective. I could continue to gush as I did just a moment ago, but there’s really only so many variations on words like Manic, Intense, Furious, Frenetic, Kinetic, Frantic and Fast, and I blanche before actually referring to them as schizophrenic. Partly because that just seems rude, and partly because they were more ordered than that. Pure rock-and-roll business. Tight as a knot.
It’s strange...but for a show I enjoyed as much as I enjoyed this one, I’ve actually had almost nothing to say about the bands themselves. Funny how that works. But it leaves me room (because 1,500 words clearly isn’t enough) to talk about another subject entirely: Rocks.
For those handful of you who haven’t heard, Rocks went into an indefinite hibernation on Saturday, after the outdoor patio tent, for which they were so infamous, snapped 1 inch tethers and ripped free of its concrete moorings to pop (sources say) thirty feet in the air and come down on some power lines and three cars. The words, ‘Act of God’ are apparently being bandied about in tandem with, ‘Well, we’re not covering it, but this will triple what you pay for your insurance premium.’ And like a good neighbor, State Farm was there...to shut down a fucking amazing club and put a few of my friends essentially out of work. Assholes.
So Rocks did what we would expect of any establishment generally managed by Will Macabre: Apocalypse Party. Saturday night every beer was a dollar, every shot was two, and the theme of the night was Every Thing Must Go. And Go it did. And you bet your bottom fucking dollar, snarklings, your faithful Electric Bastard was there, front row center, promptly at 11:30, to watch it go down. And you bet your bottom fucking dollar, snarklings, your faithful Electric Bastard ran for his life shortly thereafter.
The closing of a bar is a tricky thing. When it was the Nanci, it was different-the mania was tempered by everybody knowing deep-down in their heart of hearts that the shithead landlord couldn’t possibly hold out forever, he’d drop his price to at least Fair Market Value, the girls would be back in business and the Nanci would rise again. It didn’t, but that didn’t stop any of us from living in that illusory fugue of absolute certainty at the time. Rocks didn’t close happy like the Nancy. Rocks didn’t go out because their punkette proprietors were taking a stand against the man and demanding they get the respect they pay for. Rocks went out in a freak Wizard of Oz re-enactment that nobody could have predicted, nobody could have stopped and nobody could be blamed for.
For those of us who look at our favorite bars as our second homes, the regulars and patrons of Rocks can be likened to the victims of flood and hurricane and mudslide and fire. Through no fault of their own, their home was stripped away from them and left them clutching at the ashes for that one, last, tearful farewell. And I got the fuck out of there before I was ripped limb from limb. Because Rocks didn’t go out smiling. Rocks didn’t go out happy. Saturday night at Rocks ended the way Saturday morning began at Rocks, in mindless, impotent destruction. It didn’t actually come to pass, but that place was misty with a palpable kind of aggression and deconstructive impulse that made it seem like they didn’t just want to close the doors, they wanted to tear that fucker down brick-by-brick and take some with them.
Nobody wants to be reminded of a bar they loved that had to close and sits as an empty canker sore on the face of Main street. Because it’s still THERE. You drive past the empty shell going, “Look! It’s still fucking THERE! It’s habitable, it’s touchable, it’s physically in existence. Why isn’t it lit up like Father Christmas and the Oscars? Why am I not in there trading jokes with Will and slamming burbon?” And I’m honestly surprised that place didn’t get disintegrated by its own regulars.
I admit. I used to talk a lot of shit about Rocks. That was when Dave Homewrecker worked there. That was before Will Macabre ran the bar, before Becca worked the door, and before I’d spent 18 months of Mondays on the patio, around the pool table, holding down the bar, laughing, living and loving. So, I admit it. I came to love that place. And when I got there, Saturday night, I could see how easy it would be to get caught up in the tide of aggressive sentiment and want to take a little piece of the old bitch with me.
So here’s a little eulogy to the old girl. Hopefully a temporary one. Because she’ll be missed. The comfortable barstools. The couch by the dancefloor. The tables in the back where Sorrel and I talked each other through hundreds and thousands of words worth of writing. That one table in the back room that wobbled so fucking bad it made you sea-sick, but that I’d spent so many hours sitting at, I barely noticed. The patio bench we were disassembling one splinter at a time. The one, last sturdy picnic table where I told Dave how bad his book sucked. Here’s to Will Macabre, the best fucking bartender in the city. Not once. Not ONE GOD DAMNED TIME in the last nine months did I actually finish paying the cover and getting my 21+ wristband that Will didn’t already have my first beer on the bar, waiting for me. These aren’t just things. These aren’t just assets to liquidate. These are fucking memories. And they’ll be with us forever.
When the actual show begins, it is an assault of heavy bass and the kind of simple, throbbing rhythm that functions as the perfect soundtrack for a carpet bombing.
It’s not just two guys with keyboards. It’s not even just two guys with keyboards bobbing their heads to completely different rhythms. It’s two guys with keyboards bobbing their heads to two completely different Industrial rhythms. This is modern industrial music. The kind of stompy, thumping, wall-shaking fuck-kill, brainsmasher music that puts a smile on the face of every adolescent shithead who ever waited until they were out of eashot before they said, “Fuck you, dad,” and help up his black-nailed middle finger at pop culture.
It may seem like I’m about to start talking shit about Industrial music, and that’s probably because I am. Shamelessly and relentlessly, in point of fact. But I also respect it, in my own backwards mutant sort of way. Because Industrial has, as a genre, staged one of the greatest coups in the history of rock music-which is made doubly fascinating by merit of it’s being a retro-coup...much like a retro-virus in many ways, which is to say that Industrial music is very much like AIDS in at least a few key regards. Industrial music allows socially inept people who don’t want to talk to other people or present things to crowds or introduce things...and, pretty much want nothing more than to hide behind smoke, equipment and a thick black curtain, wearing those ungodly huge bulletproof headphones so they can pretend like they don’t hear your insipid nattering. Being an industrial artist lets you stand behind a keyboard, never say a word, barely be seen, never get recognized and still be a Rock Star. How cool is that? And that’s the coup. I consider it a retro-coup because this is essentially the same dream and demeanor as the progenitors of much of classical music. Showy drama queens (read: Mozart) aside, my understanding is that Georges Bizet was very much like an Industrial Musician. No, seriously. Look at his picture on wikipedia. That’s what an Industrial musician would have looked like back in 1850. Would you recognize Sergei Rachmaninoff is you bumped into him on the street? Do you even know who or what a Rachmaninoff is? Who the shit am I even writing for, anymore? Who are you people? Who am I?
Don’t like public speaking? SIMPLE! Just comb every video in your local Blockbuster for an easily repeatable quote of approximately ten seconds and containing some sort of ominous message, sarcasm, quip, joke or deep-steated irony. Add ooncha-ooncha noise. Add Darth Vader breathing sound racked up to a ten on the lo-fi distort-o-meter. Add more ooncha-ooncha noise, but up the tempo by three. Add missile-firing sound effects. Repeat over and over one half-second of the sample layered over yet more ooncha-ooncha. Alternate the half-second sample and the ooncha. More missiles. Finish with another line from the same sample movie. The next line in the movie, if possible, but really any line, so long as it’s amusing. My personal choice would be to use the movie Snatch-open with the, “And here I am…and what the hell do I know about Diamonds?” and the end of the song pays off with, “Don’t they come from Antwerp?” The ½ second clip throughout the song would be, “How we comin’ with those sausages, Charlie?” and pared down to simply, “sausages,” for super-fast repeatability. The sequel to this song will begin with Brick Top’s speech about the definition of Nemesis, quote “Goody Gumdrops” for the half-second repeater and end with, “in the quiet words of the virgin mary-come again?” Give me about 3 hours and I can come up with another 8 tracks, all using quotes from the movie Snatch, and now I have a Concept Album...ooo! Voila. Rock Star.
And again, it sounds like I’m talking smack about this band. Bizarrely, I’m actually not. I like W.A.S.T.E. Quite a bit, in point of fact, but there’s unfortunately quite little to say here. They have a little stage presence with the whole bobbing of the head thing, but that’s a pretty dead-end subject. Their lyrics aren’t much to write home about, on account of that whole not-existing thing, and one song is fundamentally very much like another. I could write, “And then we launched into the third song. This one had missile sounds, some very emphatic head-bobbing and a 135 bpm tempo. Much harder than their early 134 bpm work, which I felt was quite lackluster and could really have done with some balls.” So, instead, I’m going to take the Mick out of the Industrial genre for 500ish words. Because I’m an electric bastard.
Now they’re done and we’re waiting for Synthetic Nightmare.
I have made, tonight, the perfectly sober, informed decision to write essentially not a single word about the Synthetic Nightmare show. I’ve seen them perform maybe half a dozen times in various incarnations and line-ups of singers and guitarists. And I like them. Generally always have, though certainly moreso since the changing of the singers to Fabian and yet moreso still since the addition of their most recent guitarist, the incomparable Will ‘Rat Bastard’ Evans. And I like them. Always have and probably will continue to o so for the foreseeable future. But I’ve written them up at least twice and can really only write but so much about a band before I run out of shit to say. Which is importantly aggravating at the moment, because Will is pressing me to write a compare and contrast about the band’s shows pre-him as opposed to him-inclusive…which would be based on hazy and beer-sprinkled memories from like three months ago when they opened for Thrill Kill.
But the staples are there. I can always say that. Do they have stage presence? Of fucking course they do. Do Will and Nick, as always, completely forget where they parked the stage and wander around for a while, thrusting their guitar-bearing pelvises at unwary concert-goers? Of fucking course they do. Do the girls all faint and the boys all cry when Fabian’s junk gets perfectly outlined by his paint-thin non-trousers? Of fucking course they do. Do Nick and Will manage to each take a shot mid-song and keep going? I’m just tired of saying it, now. Because this is Synthetic God Damned Nightmare, and they are consummate professionals. Power Metal? No. Industrial? Not quite. Industro-Power Alcoholism? Yep. That’s the one.
Alter der Ruine starts when I’m not paying any attention, as I was busily watching people undesirably hitting on my friend, Sorrel, and having a wonderful commiserating laugh at her expense. So I’m going to have to try to play a bit of catch-up…which isn’t going to be easy, because these fucking guys are FAST. Their first song is a turbo-charged electronic bullet-train, speeding along precise lines like Blaine the Mono-fast enough to rip the skin off any deer with the bad luck to graze within a hundred yards. And while not quite every song is this fast or heavy-they slow down considerably for the second track to let us catch our breath-it bears mention that every song is at least as awesome. Alter der Ruine manages to climb almost instantly with the first few seconds of every song, find a sort of manic, kinetic, hypertrophic intensity, plateau there and maintain for as long as they feel they need to or want to. Every time another song ends, the disappointment is writ across the faces of every frantic dancing madman on the floor who claps but secretly wants to scream, “what’d ya stop for?” This contends for face-space as clearly as the inescapable exhaustion they are inspired unavoidably to drive themselves full-bore, pedal-to-the-metal towards. Then the next song begins to an exclaimed facial chorus somewhere between, ‘yay’ and, ‘here we go again.’ But they keep moving. They just keep moving because they have to. They’ve got their dancin’ shoes on and these kids are going to boogaloo until they puke and nothing can stop them.
Once again, however, this is a band with no lyrics, whose stage presence involves the vast array of electronic doo-dads behind which they hide, and for whom one song is, fundamentally, very much like another from a writer/reviewer perspective. I could continue to gush as I did just a moment ago, but there’s really only so many variations on words like Manic, Intense, Furious, Frenetic, Kinetic, Frantic and Fast, and I blanche before actually referring to them as schizophrenic. Partly because that just seems rude, and partly because they were more ordered than that. Pure rock-and-roll business. Tight as a knot.
It’s strange...but for a show I enjoyed as much as I enjoyed this one, I’ve actually had almost nothing to say about the bands themselves. Funny how that works. But it leaves me room (because 1,500 words clearly isn’t enough) to talk about another subject entirely: Rocks.
For those handful of you who haven’t heard, Rocks went into an indefinite hibernation on Saturday, after the outdoor patio tent, for which they were so infamous, snapped 1 inch tethers and ripped free of its concrete moorings to pop (sources say) thirty feet in the air and come down on some power lines and three cars. The words, ‘Act of God’ are apparently being bandied about in tandem with, ‘Well, we’re not covering it, but this will triple what you pay for your insurance premium.’ And like a good neighbor, State Farm was there...to shut down a fucking amazing club and put a few of my friends essentially out of work. Assholes.
So Rocks did what we would expect of any establishment generally managed by Will Macabre: Apocalypse Party. Saturday night every beer was a dollar, every shot was two, and the theme of the night was Every Thing Must Go. And Go it did. And you bet your bottom fucking dollar, snarklings, your faithful Electric Bastard was there, front row center, promptly at 11:30, to watch it go down. And you bet your bottom fucking dollar, snarklings, your faithful Electric Bastard ran for his life shortly thereafter.
The closing of a bar is a tricky thing. When it was the Nanci, it was different-the mania was tempered by everybody knowing deep-down in their heart of hearts that the shithead landlord couldn’t possibly hold out forever, he’d drop his price to at least Fair Market Value, the girls would be back in business and the Nanci would rise again. It didn’t, but that didn’t stop any of us from living in that illusory fugue of absolute certainty at the time. Rocks didn’t close happy like the Nancy. Rocks didn’t go out because their punkette proprietors were taking a stand against the man and demanding they get the respect they pay for. Rocks went out in a freak Wizard of Oz re-enactment that nobody could have predicted, nobody could have stopped and nobody could be blamed for.
For those of us who look at our favorite bars as our second homes, the regulars and patrons of Rocks can be likened to the victims of flood and hurricane and mudslide and fire. Through no fault of their own, their home was stripped away from them and left them clutching at the ashes for that one, last, tearful farewell. And I got the fuck out of there before I was ripped limb from limb. Because Rocks didn’t go out smiling. Rocks didn’t go out happy. Saturday night at Rocks ended the way Saturday morning began at Rocks, in mindless, impotent destruction. It didn’t actually come to pass, but that place was misty with a palpable kind of aggression and deconstructive impulse that made it seem like they didn’t just want to close the doors, they wanted to tear that fucker down brick-by-brick and take some with them.
Nobody wants to be reminded of a bar they loved that had to close and sits as an empty canker sore on the face of Main street. Because it’s still THERE. You drive past the empty shell going, “Look! It’s still fucking THERE! It’s habitable, it’s touchable, it’s physically in existence. Why isn’t it lit up like Father Christmas and the Oscars? Why am I not in there trading jokes with Will and slamming burbon?” And I’m honestly surprised that place didn’t get disintegrated by its own regulars.
I admit. I used to talk a lot of shit about Rocks. That was when Dave Homewrecker worked there. That was before Will Macabre ran the bar, before Becca worked the door, and before I’d spent 18 months of Mondays on the patio, around the pool table, holding down the bar, laughing, living and loving. So, I admit it. I came to love that place. And when I got there, Saturday night, I could see how easy it would be to get caught up in the tide of aggressive sentiment and want to take a little piece of the old bitch with me.
So here’s a little eulogy to the old girl. Hopefully a temporary one. Because she’ll be missed. The comfortable barstools. The couch by the dancefloor. The tables in the back where Sorrel and I talked each other through hundreds and thousands of words worth of writing. That one table in the back room that wobbled so fucking bad it made you sea-sick, but that I’d spent so many hours sitting at, I barely noticed. The patio bench we were disassembling one splinter at a time. The one, last sturdy picnic table where I told Dave how bad his book sucked. Here’s to Will Macabre, the best fucking bartender in the city. Not once. Not ONE GOD DAMNED TIME in the last nine months did I actually finish paying the cover and getting my 21+ wristband that Will didn’t already have my first beer on the bar, waiting for me. These aren’t just things. These aren’t just assets to liquidate. These are fucking memories. And they’ll be with us forever.