The Mean Fiddler, London
2 July 2001
Somehow Lolita Storm should have got a better reaction on this bill – their shouty teen rants and splattery digital hardcore beats and pieces are part of the busy collision of electronics and rock the Young Gods were instrumental in creating after all. But perhaps the early start time is why there’s about twenty people gently bobbing in front of the trio of singers in their hand-drawn t-shirt dresses and punk attitude. The resulting blasts of defiantly anti-Spice agit-prop shrieking and close-harmony invective fall a little flat as a result, and the band seem less than sparkling as a result.
Still, give ’em a roiling moshpit and a flail of legs in the air and the sneering kick of “Red Hot Riding Hood” should get those floors heaving with righteous anger. All this, and they do come across as the Little Girl character from Absolutely grown up into cynicism with their “It’s True!” choruses and a dash of The Raincoats to boot.
If Lolita Storm fall into such easy comparisons and categorisations, then the Young Gods should probably be part of another favourite: bands who have so much become part of the definition their own particular section of music that all they need to do is be themselves for everything to work. Sure, they could easily have been playing less than on top form (it was later observed by a more ardent fan that the samples triggered during “Skinflowers” suffered somewhat in the transition downtempo for example), but they weren’t just going through the motions, even though the actions and music were familiar. While they might not be exactly groundbreaking in using electronics and live drums in a Rock template anymore, their honed-down show is still one of the best ways to get sweaty at a gig, with hardly a real guitar to be heard, though Treichler does use a semi-acoustic for texture rather than riffing during one extended post-Bladerunner ambient excursion into feedback and FX.
As ever, Franz Treichler has his combined mic stand and searchlight to wield and direct beams into the auditorium, all the while leaping, cavorting and generally getting down as he sings from a whisper to a throaty roar. He likes to throw his hands into Hindu-influenced posed, arched above his head, one foot raised like a two-armed Siva. Treichler’s passion and the band’s throbbing bass presence and emotional power bring shades of Bono and U2 to mind – briefly. The Young Gods are in an entirely different league, but the comparisons are there to be considered nonetheless. Treichler’s stage presence has some of the aspects of godhead aspirations that his performance invokes, but without the overwhelming air of pretension which too often accompanies the donning of sleeveless t-shirts in front of a mic. He’s a great front man in other words, giving his all for the music and the crowd, even slipping the megaphone onto his head for a strange moment.
Through the deployment of megaphone and the limber antics, he keeps the stage busy to a backdrop of Al Comet‘s highly-structured digital electronics and Bernard Trontin‘s powerhouse drumming. French is such a great language for emotional delivery of this sort of thing, despite what the Anglophone Rock paradigm might have you believe. Treichler’s polyglot skyscraping vocal switch to the right tongue for the moment as the word fit the songs, even if the power of the music can run away with itself sometimes into the direction of not-quite bombast in the full swing of stop-start singalong choruses and big sampled riffing chords. It’s at these points that the Young Gods’ healthy injections of Techno make things swing away from just the moments of stagediving moshpit frenzy, with the segues between fitting in as naturally as the smoke machine gouts and synth swirls throb off into psychedelic trance directions to an echoed heavy dub beat. This is where the inclusion of the audience with the whole event swells up; it’s possible to observe the patterns of crowd formation shift from good-natured crowd-surfing ruckus to pulsing rave, while Treichler jogs away or waves his hands in the air in the blinding white light alternating with near-darkness.
For sheer energy, the Young Gods can still show Ministry or Nine Inch Nails more than a thing or two about the “Industrial” element of rock, and their grasp of MDMA tribalism can simultaneously knock spots off the bloated crowd-pleasing excess of Big Beat (whatever happened to that…?). What’s more, they play those sampled blues too in a weird echo of ZZ Top or even Lynnerd Skynnerd‘s drive-time aesthetic of booze and fags to the delight of the sweltering moshpit – and as is their habit, encore with a Kurt Weill/Brecht number, this time “Charlotte”. What with the stagediving (and Al Comet takes his turn) and general kicking fun time rammed up solid against a educated, educating sensibility, there’s nothing quite like the blend which the Young Gods achieve live, and more so than on record it must be said, of solid heart-pounding entertainment.
-Antron S. Meister-
