Overview
Last night’s Holy Fuck/My Disco do at Beck's Bar was an apt demonstration of how less is more for largely instrumental live bands.
My Disco’s harsh repetition of simple phrases and sounds is, frankly, pretty dull on record but hugely compelling live. It’s easy to get locked into the band’s rhythm; aligned with the same few notes and words played extremely loud, over and over, driven forward by percussion or an occasional chord change. It’s all build-up and no catharsis, but in person it’s so brutally uncompromising that that’s fine. The aural space their music describes is so definite that it’s an end in itself; it doesn’t have to lead anywhere, but rather offers somewhere that, depending on taste, captures your full attention and is easy to inhabit. ‘Specially if you like cold, sterile concrete rooms, and damn if that doesn’t do it for me.
Which makes for an interesting juxtaposition with Canada’s Holy Fuck who, moment to moment, have an undeniably lusher, more layered sound, and are a joy to listen to at home or anywhere. But they kind of paint themselves into a corner in concert. The four-piece’s additional instrumentation and surfeit of ideas and flourishes is nice, no doubt, but serves to build individual songs up until there’s either some sort of climax or, eh, nothing: a go-nowhere synth jam which is a pretty major drag when you’re just standing around listening. To be fair, while a lot of Holy Fuck’s set last night was the latter, twice during the set and once during the encore, they boiled over into something amazing. Washes of synths, drums, whacked-out processed voices going nuts, and hey, I just realised I’m complaining about three decent climaxes in a night.
Hmm.
