Word: takings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...like the ex-husband and wife duo of Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss, a.k.a. Quasi. The pair opened the evening with a blast of optimism in the form of "Smile," in which Sam and Janet start off with sugary harmonies over a bouncing beat. Then the lyrics begin to take hold and things turn sour in a hurry. "You lost your health/Never had no wealth/So tighten up your belt/As you gather dust on some self." Coomes has gained a reputation among indie-pop circles for writing nihilistic lyrics that make the script for "Fight Club" read like a kids' book...
...Musically, Quasi take seemingly mundane pop influences (The Beatles, The Carpenters, The Monkees) and feed them through a blender of late '90s noise. Without a guitar on the majority of their songs, Quasi focus on the interplay between the roxichord (Coomes' organ-like instrument) and drums. What they lack in musical accompaniment, they make up for with anger and volume. During "Our Happiness is Guaranteed," Janet Weiss pounds out drumbeats that come close to knocking her off her own stoo, while Coomes climbs on top of his keyboard and takes a few moments to beat it senseless in a furious...
...Hard to tell how to take what happens next: Iggy rocks out, albeit with a new song. Whilst Iggy was crooning all acoustic like and you were paying attention to the audience, his band members ambled out sans subtlety and picked up their instruments, so that when the next song is loud and fast, it's neither surprising nor especially heartening. Is Iggy, y'know, disavowing this soft and earnest crap he was just feeding us? Makes it worse if even he doesn't have his heart in it. This new song: "Ya yo hablo espaol" goes the refrain ("Espaol...
...Even harder to tell how to take what happens next: Iggy and his flunkies play "Raw Power," letting loose enthusiasm genuine and copious. Hard to criticize Iggy performing one of his great songs, and performing it pretty well. And there's the problem, I think. When Iggy was in the Stooges--before they became VH-1 "Behind the Music" material--the Stooges meant something. Sure they were a buncha high school drop-out glue-sniffing losers who made a hellacious garage noise with instruments they could barely play, but they had something to say. Basically: "screw you, I am human...
...have the same thought in mind while doing their thing: "this is way too much fun, I can't believe they're actually paying me to do it!" Singer Gene seemed to be having an equally good time. When the rest of the band stepped off stage "to take a leak," leaving him to play a lighter-waving ballad, he barely managed to keep a straight face through the second verse. Though the band's musical mix of grungy alt-rock and bouncy hoe-down country would have made for a decent concert by itself, it was their presence...