Live Review: Death By Audio

By: Michael Bradshaw

July 3^rd, 2009

Rating: 8/11

To launch a manifesto you have to want: A. B. & C., and fulminate against 1, 2, & 3... but if you can get Zs, Skeletons, Dome Theatre, High Red Center, and Charlie Looker to play a rock show in Williamsburg instead, that works too.

Friday night, Brooklyn's favorite riverside storehouse Death By Audio alighted like an antique movie projector and threw upon the screen of Williamsburg's ears the new sound of avant garde. Between the dusty, nicotine-stained linoleum, and drop-ceilings that make whatever that building used to be now the place where the bearded cool mingle with models in flannel, a moody soundtrack to the new ne plus ultra stumbled and plucked with fine drama.

Ex Zs guitarist and present Extra Life front man, Charlie Looker assembled his wiry frame behind a mocha-finished acoustic to inaugurate the night with a swath of inky, impossibly slicked-down hair. Looker bullied the mic with spare, soul-baring hymns, liturgical as they were venomous. Tears streaked Looker's face in the smokey air, but he insisted he wasn't crying. No, not, “like a fucking child.”

High Red Center picked up the emotional pieces and stirred them in to convoluted little elixirs of scrambling xylophone, weird guitar stings, and harmonizing chants.

But it was Skeletons who turned the mood Friday night from ceremony into séance. Despite cult-leader Matt Mehlan's Chino shorts and kazoo, a distinct Holy Roller vibe was palpable within the complex of noise. In fits of lovely possession, Skeletons summoned dark spirits in Brooklyn Friday, and the devoted praised them for it.

After a bizarre and delightful performance by Forrest Gillespie's Dome Theatre troope, Zs circled on stage to plunge the devils of Nouveau straight back to hell -- and they took the crowd with them. Fresh off a tour opening for Black Dice, Zs erased all sense of time as they conjured spirals of angry noise, wrapping the air in coils of razor wire. Ears were shoved to their limits and subsequently plugged by fingers. But Sam Hillmer's mid-show existential musings were cut short by demands for more. A command performance of “Achers of Skin” followed: a dulcimer-like stomp that left the night breathless as the final frame of Brooklyn's avant garde cinématique slapped against the projector's lens.