When I walked into the Empty bottle for the first time, I noticed its near-uncanny resemblance to that bar level in Guitar Hero. The stage is small – smaller than the bar – but there's lots of standing room, and lots of good views of the stage if you look around a little bit. The night was cold, especially for May; inside the bar, there was a chill in the air, and I regretted leaving my coat in the car. There was a space of an hour and fifteen minutes between door-time and Tigercity's set, and I had nowhere better to be, so I hung out and listened to the DJ while Tigercity completed a leisurely sound check. The DJ, incidentally, was really good. At long last, Tigercity took the stage and kicked off the last date of the two bands' six-week tour.
Their instrumentation was top-notch. The guitarist's loose hands and rapid, muted strums combined with the tastefully-articulated thumps from the bass to lend the music a funk inflection that meshed well with the dance beats coming from the drum kit, which were much more creative than the “MM, tss, MM, tss, MM, tss” of indie-dance-rock that I've grown so tired of. It definitely had the room swinging. The spectacle of the night, though, was a heftily-built old man bumpin' and grindin' like his bump-and-grind muscle had mere hours to live. Which it may have had.
The weak link in the lineup was the singer. He attempted to make up for a lack of charismatic stage presence by moving around a lot, but given the size of the stage at the Empty Bottle, his incessant vamping about meant that he bumped into the other band members a lot, all of which made the stage seem paradoxically too big and not big enough. His voice was most at home in an unremarkable baritone, but he spent much of his time in a falsetto that recalled Jamiroquai in its stronger moments and the Bee Gees in its weaker ones. Their music wasn't bad, but a band's live performance is only as good as its frontman. The contrast with VHS or Beta's Craig Pfunder was startling.
The man at the helm of VHS or Beta looked nothing like what I was expecting. Under dim lights at the end of an ominous introductory track of dark, ambient synth, A tall, lanky Asian man wearing some of the tightest pants I've ever seen strode up to the microphone, his face obscured by his hair. (His face remained obscured by his hair for most of the show.) The band was unhindered by the tight quarters onstage, but exuded a presence that enveloped the first few rows of the audience like a fog.
One of the first things I noticed was the band's equipment. They play some beautiful instruments. I recall a big Rickenbacker bass, a Les Paul Junior, a Bigsby-equipped SG, and a twin-humbucker Telecaster. The band has considerable multi-instrument ability, too – although the five-piece touring set was primarily drums/bass/keys/guitar/vocals (with Pfunder playing lead guitar on most songs), over the course of their set, four different people played guitar, and three played bass. Their songs were so wonderful and so thoroughly danceable, I wondered (not for the first time) why anyone goes to dance clubs. Pfunder's voice was in top condition; “You Got Me,” one of the highlights of Night on Fire, was his best Robert Smith, and “Alive” was moving, as it deserves to be. Their set concluded with a moving performance of “Bring On the Comets,” a prime example of the more straightforward pop sound attained by the album that shares its name.
A three-song encore followed, finishing with “Night on Fire” with Pfunder's black soapbar SG snarling out the lead riff. By the time the instruments dropped out and Pfunder led the audience in a chorus of
“Put your hands together and we'll light this night, light this night on fire!”
to the rhythm of upraised hands clapping, there wasn't a dry armpit in the place. The venue, shot through with a dry chill at the beginning of the night, was now hot, even steamy. The air hung bright and heavy, and every corner was suffused with awesome. I took a slow breath and emerged onto the sidewalk with an easy glide to my steps, the awesome having soaked into my leg muscles.
I didn't make the trip to the afterparty at Sonotheque, much as I would have loved to hear a DJ set from VHS or Beta, and despite the cover charge having been waived. It was 2 in the morning, I had driven to the show, and I wasn't about to go to Sonotheque by myself if I couldn't drink. But the awesome stayed with me: you know you've enjoyed a band's performance if all you want to do when you get home is listen to more of them.
Next stop: Tuesday, 5/13/08, Mt. St. Helens/The Interiors/Nouns, same bat time, same bat venue.
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