@ Kosmische
Upstairs At The Garage, London
16 September 2003
A reasonably well-filled Upstairs At The Garage is in store for a sleazy night of lateral Rock and Roll tonight. Caesar Romero pull off several good sweaty tricks – they use keyboards and guitars like they were meant to be scuzzed up and with a hint of wah; their guitarist manages to wear a stetson onstage without looking like a twat, and their music is a gritty swirl of fat, fuzzy bass, crisp drums and some occasional stroke of violin. Their female fans/friends also like to gyrate in front of the stage. Despite a couple of false attempts on their final number, it stomps their earthy set out with a hint of treble-cut analogue synth Funk and confirms the bands’ entertainment value as high.
Groop are on a another plain of entertainment altogether – glammed up in a stage strewn with fake fur and dressed like refugees from a Carnaby Street charity shop, and come complete with a carnivalesque Eno-style keyboard player in a glittery feather mask. They strut their collective stuff, and of course Moonus puts his feet on the monitor like a good incarnation of the rocking avatar should, occasionally coming on like the embodiment of synthetic leopard skin itself. Their songs veer from slightly sloppy Space Rock to NEU!-referencing stomps, with lyrics drawn from Crowley, endless mantras on the familiar themes of doing what thou wilt and everyone’s stellar qualities. Groop do a neat cover of DCT And The Bossmen‘s anti-war stomp “Brainwashed” for The War Against Terror generation too, and when Moonus and the red and fluffy Jocasta line up at the font of the stage to share mics with the other guitarist in true Seventies style, they show their ability to throw the poses is at least as effective as their devil-may-care psychedelia.
When it comes down to it, Jim Sclavunos‘s band The Vanity Set are on a yet more elevated level of showmaking entirely. They have a tuba for a bass, a violinist/Theremin player who looks like she’s steepped straight out of Cabaret and a guitarist in a purple shirt and tight trousers who could cut paper with the spikes on his hair and cheekbones combined. So much for looks, but the looming figure of Sclavunos soon gets to grips with gesturing wildly, declaiming stories of how his jokes make the world laugh or cry and tales of dark twisted love and its bitter, boozy aftereffects. The songs are delivered in magnetic, almost comedic style of a dusty bar-room resident swept up in the passion of telling a sordid, extraordinary and possibly imaginary life story. He holds the stage and the area in front of it as his own, with broad sweeps of his arms, pointing fingers and all the arsenal of performance from the fist-raising highs to the crouching lows deployed to full effect.
The Vanity Set’s show tonight resonates with all the post-Brechtian drama of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds (of which Sclavunos happens to be a member) but without the overwhelming Cave preacherman theatricality. More underground than Gothic, their sound and presentation relies on a wall of disparate sounds that transcend the immediate strangeness of the tuba, for example, sitting up a heady brew which somehow recalls both The Residents‘ eccentricic observations and the firebrand mania of Jello Biafra. At times gripping and never less than engaging, The Vanity Set put on a show with apparent ease which leaves them and the audience sweltering in the late summer heat of the roofspace with a patina suited to Scalvunos’ and the band’s exertions.
-Antron S. Meister-
