Lightning Bolt, Wolf Eyes, Jackie-O Motherfucker
@ Camden Electric Ballroom, Tuesday 7th December 2004

After a pint and Supergrass’ second album, we wander from the pub into the Electric Ballroom and are met with the sound of dissonance. Guitars are tuned up and machines hiss gently. Such are tonight’s acts that we’re unsure whether the group on stage have started their set, or are only testing their equipment. In fact, this first piece of music was just the PA warm-up tape.

The Electric Ballroom is the biggest venue I’ve been to in a while – about the size of Hull’s Welly Ballroom, if that means anything to you – and an odd place to witness this scene of such acquired taste. For much of the evening it’s uncommonly easy to walk around the place, as if in a park on an ordinary weekend. Not a huge crowd, but when guitar band Jackie-O Motherfucker do begin their set, small circles of people still stand around chatting and are easily heard over the band’s quiet drone. Their volume is so deliberately low-key at times that I don’t realise one of the five-piece is using a turntable – I can’t hear a thing from it. Watching from the balcony does impede one’s view in some ways, but sitting up there is maybe the best way to take in the slowcore vibe. Such music can often test the patience. I found the Motherfucker pleasant tonight: their post-rock is less alternate quiet/loud in its structure than a gradual meander through different volumes, so the bloke sitting down creates the only tune from a half-spoken vocal, while the players slowly bang away, a woman bawls tunelessly, fantastically, like a baby Yoko Ono and sways from side to side; then the crashing and impressive drums somehow slide slowly into the mix, but forcefully. Hypnotic is too strong a word, but there’s an appeal here beyond the stereotype of boring performance art. For comparison bands: the delicate rustling of Yo La Tengo meets Bardo Pond’s massive stoner-rock.

After JOMF have finished with a quiet one, on troop Sub Pop trio Wolf Eyes and show them a thing or two about showmanship. If it’s sheer noise you’re after, and a man screaming incomprehensible things from beneath his shaking mane, then I’ll see you down the front. Wolf Eyes treat their sound like it’s something to be abused. There’s one man beating a gong – a sound which should be Flaming Lips glorious – but the result is about as resonant as slapping shut a paperback book. Perhaps, again, I’m confused by the Ballroom’s acoustics, but with this sort of thing one can never be sure. I enjoyed it, anyway. Synthetic beats break in and out while the guitarist seems to windmill around with leads coming out of his head. Maybe he was creating feedback with his mouth.

So, one relaxing set and one major warm-up with its own sense of mystery; but the venue’s topic of conversation throughout was where are Lightning Bolt going to play? They’ve the same non-structure as the other bands fresh from playing All Tomorrow’s Parties. They are only a drummer and a bass guitarist, and they normally eschew the stage, too. At one corner in front of the stage, a tight knot of people starts to gather, and it’s obvious that’s where the performance will happen. A camerawoman behind the duo translates the shaky visuals onto a sheet above the stage itself.

Now (here’s the science bit), I’ve always felt closer to a performer’s music when I’ve been physically close to them. In the same way, a good gig has more impact on me than a good recording. The effect of live music is just so immediate. I’d imagine Lightning Bolt have a comparable motive in setting up down on the floor: it brings them closer to their fans, to the reaction their music inspires. If this means an audience falling onto the drumkit, so be it, it’s an experience they’ll have had playing countless house parties; and the ‘down-to-earth’ feeling is one that it’s nice to preserve in the pre-planned rock industry.

The Electric Ballroom is not somebody’s house, so for people who’ve paid to get in and watch the action on a screen, it’s quite an anticlimax. Only those who’ve managed to get to the first or second row will get a proper view of the band: outside it, the pit seems impenetrable and uncomfortable. Upstairs, the duo’s uncompromising rock is too quiet. Watching the band on a screen is quite bizarre, because there are people stood in front of it looking at the actual band, filmed on the screen behind the people looking at the actual band, filmed… Watching the screen makes the action one step removed. This can’t be Lightning Bolt’s intention. I’ll cherish more dearly the memory of hearing their noise for the first time: studying one night, them playing on the Peel show and me having to stop. I remember one Saturday lunchtime watching their live DVD ‘The Power of Salad’ and saying “after that, I don’t ever want to go to an indie club again!” Even my favourite classic ‘alternative’ singalongs would seem so lame after this. For all the bonus of ‘being there’ at their gig, and good as it was for them to set up the screen at all, I might as well have been watching a film at home. But when you manage to relax into the strangeness of the duo’s music, does any of this visual distraction even matter? I should be dancing.

See, I’ve saved discussing their actual music ’til last, because it was the best. The kit consists of only a snare, two toms and three cymbals. The drummer sings distorted vocals, with a mic held in place by a mask made of cloth. The bassist sounds like a guitarist. In these three elements there’s a magnificent clatter, a meaningless chaos, a pummelling variation of pitch changes and riffs which all the rock-metal giants would die for. It’s fast and hard and it barely lets up. There are tunes that you could sing with if you wished, but the best way to enjoy Lightning Bolt is to concentrate on them without thinking. A pretentious instruction, that, but this pair’s sound is so immediately odd and often repetitive that it gradually takes away all other worries, and the longer it goes on the easier it becomes to enjoy it. I'd argue that this is the reverse of the radio fluff which so blandly assaults us all our normal days. I don’t think it’s arty snobbery to say that if you relax for too long into mere ‘rhythm ‘n’ beats’ pop you’d normally get bored. Whether Lightning Bolt seem like too much noise or whether you see a beauty in their wayward quest, at least their music provokes a reaction (and one fan's inspired to such adulation that he howls for more while stealing a vital drumstick).

While off on a cultural tangent I’ve another thing to say. Watching the deliberate creation of noise – even if its creators’ sole aim is an unholy racket – sometimes has the same effect as ambitious deconstructivist art: newly presenting the world around us in some unfamiliar way. If all this hissing and banging can be ‘music’, so can anything else. No longer will the sound of pneumatic drills just be annoying. I’ll appreciate the rattle and hum of a dirty bus. Or, indeed, on tonight's train home some annoying students debating a game of vegetable animal mineral, though I'd rather listen to the Smiths on my walkman. So I’m not arguing against twee indie - it must be quite difficult, too, to write songs with stories and tunes! - but when bands like these three tonight can come along, for a while they blow everything else off the stage, and encourage the appreciation of everything around us - so long as it's not bland, and whether it's on the stage or not.

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