Boredoms @ Terminal 5 – 9/9/09

They played “Acid Police”!

They brought out a guy on a platform carried by bearers, playing drums in the style of a Roman emperor.

A dude called Lichens sat in a chair and made scary faces and beautiful shrieks to open and left after a tasteful ten minute set.

Eye wore the kind of drum major hat appropriate for the event, alternating between color guard chanting and a demi-human wailing. He’d fall screaming to his knees, then run back to the guitar tree and strike it with his color-coded batons, or loop over to his equipment rack to lowpass the hell out of the guitar part of “Acid Police”. The drums swelled in volume and ferocity based on his minimal direction. Everyone worked their asses off.

Overall they were tight as usual but more varied than the usual Boredoms sets of recent note. All are good, but this was the closest to capturing the sheer mania of 77 Boadrum.

Brooklyn Vegan has some nice pictures up and a quote from your friend and mine Matt about the crowd. Contra his opinion, I thought the crowd was fine. The one jerky guy (dude in a sports coat pounding the brew) took himself out of the game with a self-induced stagger; a half-filled Terminal 5 turned out to be far cooler, though still sweaty, than previous visits.

Since I’m going to be starting a long-term freeform noise project and kinetic installation called “screaming baby”, this was my last show for a long time. While it was just about as good a way to go out as one could possibly hope for, the days of taking off on a Thursday night to go see random acts are definitely over.

I’ll try to make exceptions for special cases and tours around 2012 or so. (Perhaps my missing out on some good acts is what the Mayans were warning us about?)