Music

Just got back home from seeing Bile, Zeromancer, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and (last, but most definitely not least) Pigface at the Catwalk. Awesome show.

Work let me off early so I could go, so I got home about 6:30pm. Changed clothes and waited around the apartment for Candice to show up, then we walked down to the club and got there just a bit before Bile started. They weren’t bad, but were a little harder than I usually go for — wasn’t going to complain about seeing them, but not someone I’m likely to go searching out the CDs for, either. The high point of their show was a cover of the J. Geils Band’s ‘Love Stinks’, which worked surprisingly well as an industrial track.

Since Bile wasn’t really our thing, Candice and I hung out near the entrance, and toward the end of Bile’s set Chad and Don showed up. Not long after that, Kim and Kayo joined us right about as Zeromancer was starting. Zeromancer was more to my taste than Bile — I still might not go searching out their CDs, but if I happened to hear that they were playing in town and I had the money to go, I wouldn’t mind seeing them again. Again, the high point of their set was a cover tune, this time of Real Life’s ‘Send Me An Angel’.

We’d all stayed at our spot near the entrance during Zeromancer’s set where we could actually hear each other, as well as keep an eye on the door, and during the downtime between bands both Kate and Rick showed up. Just in time, too, as MLWtTKK hit the stage not long afterwards. Their set wasn’t quite as good as I had been hoping for — they were only a three-piece (vocalist, drums, and synth), and so nearly everything was sequenced, and they didn’t have the stage presence that I’ve seen from them in videos. That said, the updated arrangements to some of their classic material were really good, and the live drums made for a good show musically — it was just the stage show that wasn’t what I’d hoped for.

Kayo and I had gone down to the main floor for MLWtTKK, spending our time standing just on the edge of the pit, tossing people back in when they went flying out and hauling the occasional body up from the floor after a tumble (one of my favorite positions for a good show, actually). When we went back to the rest of the group during the downtime, it turned out that they’d been given a choice spot to actually watch the show, in a security booth just behind the sound booth. We all stood and peoplewatched during the downtime (and believe me, a goth/industrial show is quite the place for peoplewatching), then I headed back out to the floor when Pigface came on stage.

Pigface, quite simply, tore the place up. Incredible set — anywhere from five to twelve people on stage depending on the lineup for the song, and constant insanely high energy. I stayed right on the edge of the pit area again, getting pulled in and taking a tumble once (then getting hauled right back up to my feet). Most of the songs were from their newest album, “Easy Listening (for Difficult Fuckheads)“, but they threw in quite a few old favorites, including ‘Divebomber’ (from “Notes From Thee Underground“) and finishing off with ‘Suck’ (originally from “Gub“, though it’s appeared in many incarnations on many albums over the years).

‘Suck’ first came out on the Pigface album “Gub”, credited to Martin Atkins, William Rieflin, Paul Barker, and trent reznor. When trent included a cover of ‘Suck’ as a hidden track on his ‘Broken‘ album, he listed the credits as ‘trent reznor with Pigface’. This apparently led to something of a falling out between trent and Martin, and trent hasn’t been involved in a Pigface project since…. Interestingly enough (for me, at least), when they introduced ‘Suck’, Martin said that “this is a song by trent reznor….” In all honesty, I didn’t know that they were still ticked enough at that to be making snide remarks at the shows!

At one point, they were playing a song off of EL(fDF) (the exact one I’m not sure of, as I haven’t quite memorized that album yet) that has the refrain “Jacob is a liar.” However, in a crowded club, at high volume, and with a ton of distortion, since I didn’t know the lyrics off the top of my head, the only thing I could make them out saying was “stainless steel papaya!” I knew that that wasn’t what they were saying, but it kept me laughing throughout the song — I didn’t actually find out what the actual lyrics were until Kate told me after the show.

Anyway, incredible show. My ears aren’t likely to recover before, oh, Thursday at the earliest, but that’s all part of the fun, right (for what it’s worth, I did have earplugs that I wore for some of the show, so it’s not as bad as it could be)? I also picked up a MLWtTKK shirt and the only Pigface album I didn’t have yet (“The Best of Pigface: Preaching to the Perverted“), plus earlier in the night I was handed a CD from a band apparently from Vancouver, BC by the name of Charlie Drown (I haven’t listened to it yet, so I have no idea what it’s like but I was told, “Here — you’ll probably like this,” when it was handed to me…). All in all, quite the good night.

I’ll leave off with something that Martin Atkins (the main force behind Pigface) said at one point during the set…

Never understimate the effect that you, as one individual, can have in any situation if you put your mind to it!