THE NOTWIST with THEMSELVES at Lee’s Palace, February 7. Tickets: $15. Attendance: sold out. Rating: NNnN
Rating: NNNN
California indie rhyme outfit Themselves may have true heads up in arms over whether their tunes deserve to be filed under hiphop in rekkid stores, but judging from their frenetic performance at Lee’s last Saturday night, the bigger question is whether their boundary-pushing avant-rap assault works better in theory than in practice. I like the idea of the Anticon Records darlings – vicious, politically charged flows delivered at lightning speed by a Tasmanian devilish MC over soupy experimental tracks of anti-melodic hooks and jagged beats. Add arty experimental video projections to the mix and you should have a killer live show.
It didn’t play out that way. The tunes ranged from goth-tinged rave-ups to a weird electroclash number that sounded like a mash-up of You’re So Vain and Fuck The Pain Away but somehow came across as a characterless blend of angry aggro aural wallpaper.
Meanwhile, mohawked, bespectacled MC Doseone hammed it up onstage, scurrying and jumping and contorting his face like he was channelling Keith Flint from Prodigy’s Firestarter video. Amusing enough, but it didn’t distract from the fact that you could barely distinguish what he was trying to get across in his gratingly nasal, marble-mouthed meth-rush delivery.
Maybe the screen projections contained clues for how to read the songs. D’you think the slide with blindfolded mannequins was about how we’re all sheep in a culturally imperialist society? The Dubya-as-Satan connotations on another image were cute, but you can find Bush = Terrorist T-shirts in hundreds of head shops.
Themselves could’ve learned a few lessons about pulling off ambitious, electronic-heavy avant-pop from class act headliners the Notwist .
With nary a screen projection in sight, the German former hardcore punk crew captivated the mature-looking audience (even the barflies at the back of the club shut up – unheard of at Lee’s) by building up and stripping down layers of emotion-charged, gauzy atmosphere, merging shoegazer guitar fills with tasteful electronics and complex jazzy drum breaks.
Hyper-polite frontman Markus Acher quietly introduced each song with restrained thank-yous, apparently bemused by the crowd’s hands-in-the-air admiration, before soothing fans with a serene coo that ebbed and flowed around his band’s genre-jumping instrumental mastery.
The club was so packed I could barely see the stage, even though the renovations at Lee’s have improved sightlines considerably. Still, I was tickled by Markus’s brother Micha ‘s bobbing and weaving antics – the guy’s gotta be the most animated bassist I’ve ever seen.
Staggering set-closer Pilot/Different Cars And Trains shuttled along an arc of Sonic Youth post-rockers, jagged Fallesque indie jangle and Radioheadish glitch-electronica before descending into intelligent, organic dubby techno without ever seeming forced. And that was just one song.
With breadth like that and a powerfully understated stage presence, the Notwist could very well be headlining at an arena near you in the not-so-distant future. Thom Yorke better watch his back.
sarahl@nowtoronto.com
