This scarily underattended show brought back memories of a Bardo Pond show at the same venue three years ago. The gig was scary good and the crowd was shy, but game, although most people didn't dare to descend upon the largely empty floor until the second half of the headliner's set. The aftermath of this is that Bardo Pond haven't come back since.
Last night, Gris Gris impressed me greatly with their metronomic Spacemen 3 act. Setting up on the floor, presumably because there was no room on the stage to set up around the Warlocks multi-guitar, multi-drum arrangement, brought an intimacy to their set that you wouldn't expect from pounding drone-rock (which always seems like such a standoffish type of music to me).
When the Warlocks took to the darkened stage, the energy level in the crowd was approaching zero, and the band launched into their set with calculated efficiency. As the crowd loosened up, they seemed to do the same (chicken? egg? chicken? egg?), relying mainly on the concise songs from their new album "Surgery". Their last Toronto gig was frighteningly loud, with a couple hundred souls packed into a sweaty Horseshoe to listen to one two-chord jam after another. But just as "Surgery" favours songs over mesmerizing jams, so did this gig, with the bulk of the new album rubbing shoulders with the more "hit-single" qualities of "Phoenix Album" tracks "Shake the Dope Out" and "Hurricane Heart Attack". Although I have to wonder why, if they opted to play a pop set rather than a rock one, why they left out the 60's girl group/"Psychocandy" excesses of "Angels in Heaven, Angels In Hell" or "Evil Eyes Again". Even the critics that dislike the new album (of which there are many, but fuck them) enjoy those two songs. What is holding the Warlocks back? Loyalty to their "jam it out" beginnings? Go whole hog and become a pop band! Verve started out as a jam band and became a pop band. Animal Collective are headed that way too, if their new album is any indication!
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