The Waldorf Hotel
Vancouver, British Columbia
Six Organs of Admittance with Low Hums and Mirror Lake was exactly the show I needed to wash out the still-acrid taste of Mode Moderne, Terry Malts and the Fresh & Onlys at the Media Club a couple of weeks earlier. Best of all, Six Organs et al. were all surprisingly better than I had expected.
There are two ways to make interesting music: by having a completely original sound incomparable to anything that has previously existed or by blending pre-existing styles in ways never (or at least seldom) heard before. Though I failed to find a single piece of information on the Vancouver-based Mirror Lake prior to the show (although I had no trouble at all when I searched again afterwards), they immediately intrigued me as a case of the latter. Right away, they captivated me with their brooding Turn on the Bright Lights-era Interpol hooks and similar steady builds and tremolos. Mirror Lake's pounding bass, riddling the audience's ears like rounds from a Gatling gun in tandem with drum-work brimming with fills, could have emanated from Carlos D. and Sam Fogarino themselves, if the audience didn't know better. "All right, so Mirror Lake's a really tight post-punk group. Sweet," I thought. But then, lapping up like agitated waves from below the surface of post-punk rhythms and tempos, came lashes of psychedelic keys and dual guitars. Mirror Lake was the first band I ever heard to blend post-punk and psych or at least to have done so so skilfully that I liked it enough to have noticed.
As the next band, Seattle's Low Hums, indicated, the night was only about to become even more psychedelic. On record, Low Hums often hint at Swans-style post-rock; at times, Michael Gira himself even seems to possess lead-singer Jonas Haskins, albeit at Gira's tamest. But although the pastoral psych quartet did not take long to break into a bluegrass-jam with banjo, shaker and lap steel, Low Hums were able to just as quickly turn around and conjure a Judgment Day-ominous riff with as much menacing, slow-brew suspense as any doom-psych band. Their third-last song in particular, with several false disintegrations in the forms of droning Brian Jonestown Massacre-like interludes, could have been dubbed space-rock, as it rocketed me into a different galaxy. Following that cosmic experience was another song that could have fit seamlessly amongst the BJM's oeuvre, this one alongside their catchier, Matt Hollywood-penned hits.
The psychedelic attack peaked with San Francisco's Six Organs of Admittance, the solo project of Comets on Fire guitarist Ben Chasny. Backed by a three-piece band, anyone who had heard Six Organs' latest album Ascent probably knew why Chasny enlisted the extra muscle. I, however, was not one of those people. I had known Six Organs of Admittance for delicate, calculated, introverted neo-folk, so when the first sounds that erupted from the stage with a ferociousness that could have blown the (faux-?)bamboo finish off of the walls, I was more than taken aback. It was difficult to believe that the music with which I was familiar - which I had expected - was borne of the same creature that was attacking every part of his guitar with Palaeolithic savagery right before my eyes. But observe Chasny closely, and one would have seen that his furious attack was merely a veneer - that he was, in fact, dissecting his guitar as precisely as a surgeon manoeuvres its knife.
The only serene moment of Six Organs of Admittance came during their only encore, Chasny's sole unaccompanied performance of the night. I wish I knew the name of the song, because it was the most pleasant way to close the show - aside from my successful acquisition of their set list.
With a surprise as good as Six Organs of Admittance at the Waldorf, it was a good thing I did not remember until at least more than halfway through their set that my friend, with whom I had attended the show, described Ascent some weeks back as very much a hard rock record. She wasn't fucking kidding. The crispness of Chasny's playing was ultimately key in the indelible impression Six Organs left on me, his guitar-work sharp amongst the frenzy of every other instrument. If the Men can learn a lesson from Six Organs of Admittance in this respect, maybe the Brooklyn quartet's recent Waldorf show would have been memorable.
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