PROLOGUE (If you want to skip ahead to the real review and ignore stories about my high school life, please do so now):
It was sometime in my sophomore year of high school when my best friend Richard interrupted my daily listen of Icky Thump by The White Stripes and said something like, “Yo, check out these guys named ‘Giraffes? Giraffes!’ because they’re fucking incredible,” and I looked up The Giraffes instead and said “Yeah, man!” because I was too shy to say I didn’t like them.
OK, none of that happened. Instead, he showed me this video and I ran back to my house, ordered a horse mask online, and practiced my drums to be exactly like horse-mask guy (actually Kenneth Topham). I was hooked. Everything that happened after, every single one of their albums I bought and listened to over and over, every single live video I watched, every single scrap of information I hunted down to get the latest news on upcoming albums, everything happened because not only did these guys somehow harness the incredible musicianship required of “math rock” bands and make it fun, they did so with incredible soundscapes and sheer joy. Math rock was (and still is) a weird genre to dive into for me; at the time, Hella was too scary and Tera Melos was too, well, I don’t know. I don’t even want to know what 16 year-old me would have thought of Neptune (we’ll get there).
Point is, G? G! somehow ended up scoring many moments of my high-school life, including the unforeseen feat of BOTH post-Prom drives home (seminal moments for every high schooler, especially when wondering which cliff jump would make the coolest death for everyone to talk about the next day instead of your horrid “dance moves”). When I moved to the East Coast, being in the same time zone as G? G! was enough cause for another dozen straight plays of Pink Magick (which, as far as you know, I did). And then, almost two years after I came here, I saw an online poster for a show at MassArt. Neptune (rad), Potty Mouth (awesome), Beware The Dangers Of A Ghost Scorpion (sweet name) and…good fucking god.
I went. It happened. This is my story.
END PROLOGUE
The night kicked off with some severe Indiana Jones flashbacks as — wait, those were snakes. Indy was afraid of snakes. Scorpions didn’t even come into play. Shit.
The night kicked off with some severe The Scorpion King flashbacks, as the four identically dressed dudes of Beware The Dangers Of A Ghost Scorpion! wordlessly stalked (slithered? crawled?) onto stage and treated all of us to a half hour of beachy, blues-y instrumentals. I gotta say, what started out as a very silly-looking gimmick actually translated into an extremely well-done opening set. I couldn’t figure out why these guys didn’t have a singer (and to be honest, I still feel like they should), but they’re extremely good musicians. Guitar work especially. Were it not for the whole “bandanas and scorpion shirt” thing, I’d be able to give them proper credit for their individual prowess, but perhaps it’s in their wishes that I compliment the band as a whole. Which I will. Great job, BTDOAGS. You’re now my favorite band with the word “Scorpion” in it. Sorry, Scorpion.
Potty Mouth, whom I’ve written about before on this site (ed. note: more literary fangirling of Giraffes? Giraffes! ensues in that link), brought their A-game to a C+ crowd. A couple of pretty solid new songs aside, I recognized most of their set from the last time which, if you haven’t heard these gals before, makes you want to grab your high school self and slap some more angst and daydreams into their head. New amongst the group was guitarist Ali, who did a solid job with the new stuff and a great job with the old. However, she didn’t quite nail her vocal turn on “The Better End” as well as Phoebe Harris did the last time I saw this band (if she’s reading this, Hi Ali! How are you? My advice is not to worry about the screaming, dude. You can do that really well. Get angry. Get real fucking bitchy. You seem like a very kind person, which is rad, but I want to feel like I just broke up with Sid and Nancy at the same time. Congrats on your second show! Toodles!) Otherwise, everything else was pretty damn solid from this Northampton punk outfit, and I look forward to catching them again soon.
Next up was Giraffes? Giraffes!
Hoo, boy.
In the time it took setting up Ken’s monstrous kit, I got to talk with a couple of other G? G! superfans, and all of us had agreed that A) we’d all been waiting for a long, long time (four years in my case, two for them) to see them and B) we weren’t really sure how we were going to respond to their set, because there was no way they were playing our favorite songs.
And truth be told, I did have a hard time articulating myself. The first half or so was composed of material from Pink Magick, their best record, but also their darkest and what I thought would be their weakest live. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case. Every single note from “Scorpion Bowls At The Hong Kong” and “Werewolf Grandma With Knives” (Parts I and II) was spot-on. Most importantly, they were having fun. Watching Joe Andreoli work his immense array of guitar pedals is like watching a flamingo pick its way through a particularly quicksand-y part of the jungle, but his skill with looping stations and effects pedals is like nothing I’ve ever seen.
Likewise, Kenneth Topham smiles on the drums as though he’s enjoying a cup of tea in some quaint British garden, and not pulverizing his extremely extensive kit (an entire antique bell set? four crash cymbals? chimes?) into oblivion. I confirmed what I had seen in videos beforehand; the duo gets out of their inhuman spazz-the-fuck-out sections by way of Joe rising on his tip-toes, Ken somehow seeing him out of the corner of his eye, and then both coming back down to earth with a guitar swipe and a hit on the crash cymbals. It’s done so many times that it becomes second nature to see it, but it’s nonetheless impressive every single time, especially considering that they smile so damn much.
Two more notes:
1) A new song happened in the middle of the set, and it was so good that I can’t even talk about it.
2) I had never heard their final song before, and I’ve been searching for it through their back catalogue for days. It’s either also new, or I’m an idiot, but it was the best song of the night and holy shit. It had the incredible ambience that was mostly missing from this set (save for Werewolf Grandma Part I), and a hard-hitting last section that gave me goosebumps. It was so terrifyingly good. If that sucker is on their next album, I don’t know how I’m going to survive these next few months of not hearing it.
At this point, my night was already made and there was still one more band to throw down. And holy shit, did they ever.
Presented without comment, the “Personnel” section of the Neptune Wikipedia entry:
Small electric spring? LARGE electric spring? In the words of Russell Crowe, “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!”
In the post-G? G! excitement, I failed to notice that, initially, the instruments being hoisted up onstage resembled guitars, drums, keyboards and such, but something was off. Turns out, that something was solid matter. Neptune’s members play on scrap metal versions of standard instruments (all homemade, as I learned later). Besides making a cool spectacle, these things had incredibly unique sounds to them (duh), and are definitely priceless. They even miked a wooden block.
The two non-drummers of Neptune (these guys are mainstays of the Boston industrial scene, and looked like it) started off by (I don’t really know how to describe it) strapping a miked cable to their genitals, stretched it across the drums and began engaging in some sort of perverse hula dance. Kevin Micka started off on a loud yet groovable beat, and would smack the shit out of this cable, creating a deep “WOAHNNHH-NGGNGNGGG” sound that I imagine would find itself in high demand amongst the hip-hop samplers of Hell. It was awesome. Way creepier than I liked to admit. But awesome.
It got weirder, and more Satanic-sounding from there. Sanford soon moved to his keyboard as the band shifted into a more “normal” setup, and wailed like a combination of Michael Gira from Swans and a dolphin as Pearson picked up his guitar. It became dance-y, as much as this band could be dance-y, and it didn’t let up for a long, long time. Thrashing necks abound.
In an impressive feat of scheduling, this bill of Beware the Dangers of a Ghost Scorpion!, Potty Mouth, Giraffes? Giraffes! and Neptune got weirder and weirder as the night went on, and the crowd (though almost completely motionless) ate it up. My own personal history with Giraffes? Giraffes! aside, this was a fantastic night, and hats off to MassArt (and Eventworks SIM) for throwing this together.
