I apologize for the horrible title of this blog entry. I could not help myself and am already ashamed, but continuing in the trend of reviewing things that happened a while ago as if they are newsworthy, this concert actually happened almost three weeks ago:
While standing on the balcony in the dark at the Paradise waiting for the concert to start, a man and his girlfriend came up and stood next to me. Apparently this man wanted to take the headlining act as literally as possible, and he proceeded to lecture his girlfriend, non-stop, about how noise music is the real avant-garde, because it makes you question societal conventions about music, you don’t need the be loud to be noisy because you can overdrive a low-power amp quite easily, he has dedicated his life to promoting noise and the avant-garde, people just aren’t ready to accept it, this music is like a spritual experience, and a host of other inanities time has been kind enough to let me forget. Once the music began, he cut his diatribes with some savant-style humming, extemporaneous shrieks, and energetic humping.
In spite of my distate for my neighbor, he was actually right about a few things. (Actually, most of the things he said are roughly true, although still hazardous territory for the aspiring conversationalist or girlfriend-keeper.) The thing that sounded the most inane to me at the outset turned out to be my one-line summary of the show:
Seeing the Boredoms in concert is like going to church, if church was awesome.
Apologies to the religionists out there, but even though you invented awe, I think Yamantaka Eye does it better.
The concert starts with eYe in the center of the three (!) drummers, holding a pair of glowing orbs. As he swings them around, they make some insane noise, responding to the motion, as eYe shrieks, and the drummers start this rumbling beat. This continues as some sort of crazy crescendo until someone behind the scenes switches the orbs from “noise” to “synth” and they start making tones. The drummers go nuts, and eYe goes to beat the crap out of the Sevena.
What is the Sevena?
photo from trontnort’s flickr
That’s it from the back. Seven guitars fused together, played with broomstick handles of different lengths. That way, you could play each neck individually, or you could smash at all the strings on one side at the same time. It sounded as awesome as it looks, and required a helper guy to stand behind it constantly retuning as eYe broke the strings off.
The whole thing was awesome, and I feel stupid for bothering to write this down, because the best thing about the whole experience was the sense that there would be no way to describe it to anyone who wasn’t there. So, just take this as a hearty endorsement/recommendation from me to go see the Boredoms if you ever get a chance.
(That standard disclaimer about bringing earplugs still applies, although I took mine out because it was too awesome and I don’t respect my hearing enough.)
two posts in one day, booyah
