RIFF MARKET

Boredoms
Starlight Ballroom/Club Polaris
June 30

Always despised the 'bags out there who'd hear something marginal then say "oh man, so this is why I've dedicated my life to writing record reviews and concert previews for my local newspaper," as if the reason people listen to music is at all obscure. It really isn't! Let's be clear: We listen to music because it sounds awesome coming out of cars. That's about it. It's not like you can drive around waving around a sweet painting you drew and get the same rush, and it's definitely not like you're going to buy a firetruck and drive around with Vito Acconci jerking off under the ladder. You'd make a turn, he'd skip a beat, and all the sudden you're a bigger 'bag than the guy who hides under floorboards and makes sex noises for a living.

The flip of that is Garden State-inspired aversion to music's ability to change lives, to turn a man into a Portman, and that's sad too. If you do interact with music on a personal buy-in level, be it an overwhelm-via-sound or "gosh darn Elliott Smith knows exactly how my fifteen-year-old self feels," you're effete, to most a clown, a pussy to a few. It's like you might as well drink sparkling water out of a snifter or something. You just can't talk about music like that--it's always TMI, always subject to "personal narrative masquerading as criticism" snaps and, a shame, if it ain't criticism it's considered worthless. Don't get me wrong, I can't stand the "pull over on the side of the road" brand of writing some people think they've made a career out of--most times the people bore me and the music's marginal. But I catch myself snubbing my nose at that sort of passion-for-passion fan-not-critic interaction most people who like music still enjoy, and so who's the 'bag now.

I went to Boredoms with my friend's 15-year-old brother, who's from Stroudsburg so he doesn't do the live music thing often. Philly, that means physicality, lots of young kids covered in body paint, fat dudes covered in hair and unafraid to take their shirts off at the mere sight of a guitar. People still crowdsurf, and girls dance to Lightning Bolt and tear off their dresses just to wipe the sweat off their faces. Sean Agnew, who runs R5 Productions, puts together the best line-ups in any city I've ever lived in, always very disparate so you often get three distinct crowds in the same room. Here Hrvatski/Lightning Bolt/Boredoms made sense as three different-demo acts all interested in rhythmic overload--maybe. His concerts are always packed at least upfront, slight movements of the audience snowballing into a constant struggle to stay up and into it and alive. Everybody's a bigger fan than you are. Good luck taking out a notebook.

(More manifestation of Philly's anti-intellectual streak?)

The first half hour was brutal--three drummers playing mostly the same relentless break, passing off fills to each other when one got tired, creating something of the drum equivalent of Branca's bellowing guitar feedback until we all heaved and collapsed. It was physical but it was extremely musical and mentally taxing too--really had to fight to keep up and on and with them--so I don't understand people calling Boredoms hippie bullshit. Because eYe has long hair? Because a woman is playing drums? There was so clearly a language among the three drummers, a plan and an attentiveness and an unwankiness to eYe's conducting, a contour to the show you can feign as natural but can't naturally feign.

Proof of that: Everybody was shit tired minute thirty, all the guys without shirts started smelling pretty bad, a real Mortal Kombat "FINISH HIM!" type stupor. eYe brings the drums out, and Yoshimi breaks into this wordless blues, barely accompanied, catcalled at first but quickly too stunning to patronize. I'm convinced the temperature changed.

It wasn't a turn-on-the-dime, shock and awe type moment though, which is why I'm still stuck on this concert nearly a week later, easily the best I've seen the last six months. Yoshimi's blues came pretty neatly out of the banging and screaming and synthesizing, as if one was hiding the other, two faces of the same coin, etc. The closest I can come to making sense of it is Christmas lights, specifically the ones that have an adjustable chasing pattern. If you set the lights on the fastest possible chase, it loops back to "all the lights are always on." So obviously when you're 13 and in charge of the Christmas lights at your house, you try fucking with the chase pattern such that it's just a hair off from the lights going straight no chase--so that the lights are as BERSERK as possible and 100 yards away it looks like your house is on fire.

You can draw tentative if just rudimentary lines from recent Boredoms to the Sylvester family Christmas lights spectacular, at least I think so. Strikes me as very EASTERN to explore a dichotomy like that, the space between infinite speed and zero movement, "everything's secretly moving" atomic motions, etc., and I don't know bands that are flirting with those concepts so directly, so beautifully. Yoshimi's blues, works there too. Like a Magic Eye, *cough*, all the banging and screaming and squiggling suddenly comes into focus, and there it is, a 3D wizard's cap.