Dingwall’s, London
15th May 2007
It’s been a while since The Young Gods have appeared in London, but they’re back at last, in support of their new album Supeready/Fragmenté. Dingwall’s turns out to be a good choice of venue, allowing for a capacity crowd but without getting stiflingly overstuffed with people. Support band Shy Child are a duo of a drummer and synth player, the latter playing standing up with the keyboard on a strap for a more energetic performance, presumably. They’re not bad at all, angry buzzing blurps meshing well with the powerful percussion, but the vocals are monotone and hectoring in tone while remaining largely inaudible. Still, they do a good job of warming up the night.
When The Young Gods arrive onstage, it turns out they’ve adopted recycled militay fatigues both for stagewear and band merchandise, stitching the little stick figure logo on the backs of army shirts – which are suitably enough German Army surplus, as Switzerland doesn’t go to war very often these days, accidental invasions of Liechtenstein aside. With Bernard Trontin‘s drums kicking in to the steadyly-building throbs and jagged electronic metal of Al Comet‘s keyboards, Franz Treichler bounds onstage, full of energy as ever, dancing and throwing yogic shapes throughout the show. Cavorting to some mammoth Techno-Industrial beats on “Freeze”, he sings “I’m one,two,three,four tons of TNT” – and it doesn’t seem like he’s exaggerating too much.
Treichler is at his best as the focus of the performance, leading the shuddering throng into wave after wave of propulsive rhythms and phenomenally-pounded out drumming which lurches from industrial samba of “El Magnifico” to cathartic spasms of the grinding rock machine, where crowd-pleasing riffs surge back and forth in unison with the heaving moshpit. He scans the room with his searchlight mic stand, sings in operatic bliss drenched in delay effects with a range which encompasses the warm techno-rock groove of “About Time” and the furious singalong splurge of “I’m The Drug” – a standout track on the album – words and sampled riffs streaming off into skyscraping immensity onstage, and judging by the effect he has on the crowd-surfing masses, Treichler is probably suggesting that he is some sort of amphetamine. This is a classic Young Gods performance all round, a man-machine mashup which blends the essence of rock’n’roll (among other things) with a characteristic Romantic futurism, electronics and guided-muscle beats matching the vocal delivery which streaks into the void – though it’s strange how some of the older material such as the normally epic “Skinflowers” pales in comparison to the new, heftier songs, seeming a little less rounded in the encores after the battering which has come before.
It’s not all epic noise and thobbing bass; at one point Trontin plays what Treichler descibes as a flying saucer, coaxing and tapping out a gentle rhythm to the sounds of the electonic forest, while there is of all things a guitar/sitar passage played by Franz Treichler on “Stay With Us”, where he sings “Who’s gonna paint the clouds?/Who’s gonna put the tools in place?” with echoplex melancholy which borders on the clichéd while keeping a beatific sense of perspective. He even pulls on an electric guitar for a fuzz-feedback solo at one point, but their version of Kurt Weill‘s “Mack Der Messer” is suitably melodramatic at first, soon bursting into industrial punk mania and back again, prompting the thought that if Alec Empire ever remixed them, this could be how it would sound. And their closing number? What else could it be but the Young Gods’ version of Gary Glitter’s bombastic “Did You Miss Me?” from the selft-titled debut album, Treichler belting out a menacing, gutteral growl for the audience, gesturing to Trontin and Comet in turn as he sings the chorus questioningly to them. “Yes!” is the response; “And we missed you too” sings Franz in a touching finalé to a triumphant return.
-Tango-Mango-
