“Don’t put a band together with musicians who are good enough to imitate anyone well.”
–Courtney Taylor-Taylor¹
I didn’t know The Dandy Warhols had a new album coming out until the Monday before its Tuesday release. Suddenly there it was; lingering in my peripheral vision, coaxing me out of a lack of cognition. And This Machine is a particular gift.
I’ve been a fan for quite a while; ever since Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth there has been a place in my ears for their workings. Always maintaining a certain pop sensibility, I’ve found them to use this to their advantage in creating complex songs hiding under the simplicity of catchy constructions.
As a result they’ve become easy to dismiss for some, but it’s nothing they’ve done.
Maybe there’s something about northern Europe’s frozen expanses that inspires people to dress themselves up in inexplicable costumes, sit down in front of a vocoder and make some of the best electronic music to date. Whatever weirdness we may claim here in the States, it pales away to nothing when you look at what’s trickled out from the EDM scenes of England, Iceland, Sweden, and now Denmark.
My associate tends toward hyperbole. But, hell, if any event lends itself more readily – God’s Pee in concert it is. The single-file congregation outside San Francisco’s Great American Music Halldid seem like it had conspired to attire itself exclusively in black. My associate and I had missed the memo, began to feel a smidgen out of place – me with stone-colored imported chinos, she in a beige, belted trench. No, we were a downright spectacle. Forgive us our trespasses.
We awaited admittance and hoped we wouldn’t be turned away for failing to dress for the occasion. Attempting to draw attention away from myself, my eyes caught another spectacle just a few doors down from the Hall. The fabled O’Farrell Theatre, strongly tied to the late, great Hunter S. Thompson, advertised on its marquee that there was “Where the Wild Girls Are.” To the dismay of my associate, the tagline was so clever that the compulsion to inquire within came upon me. Luckily for her, the marquee right above our heads averted the potential travesty with a promise infinitely more captivating than any “wild girl” could ever hope to be:
GODSPEED YOU! BLACK
EMPEROR
APR 16 – APR 20
Three months prior, by the grace of my associate’s bank account, we had been accepted to attend the Tuesday, April 17 chapter of the week-long chronicle. The ticket I held in my hand had no compunction about letting me know just how fortunate I was to be there on “SOLD OUT! TUE APR 17 2012. ” Even back on January 18th when I informed my associate “we have to go see God’s Pee,” the preferred date of FRI APR 20 had already capitulated. Whether by consequence of being a Friday or Hitler’s birthday or something else, I’ll never know. Post-rock fans are enigmas. Hence all the black, I suppose.
