It’s a rare treat to see a decent band at Roseland. It’s an even sweeter treat to see flocks of fans, journos, stoners, feminists and question marks all come en masse to see TWO bands that are much better than decent. I saw and heard all kinds of folks at the Dead Meadow/Sleater-Kinney show at Roseland last night and I think I know why, or maybe I’m just trippin’.
On their latest, The Woods, Sleater-Kinney have shifted their musical focus from the lick to the riff, so it makes perfect sense that they would take mighty DC riffmasters/dream weavers Dead Meadow out on a bigggggg national tour with them. What at first seemed like a “wha?” combination started to make sense after you got over SK’s theoretics and just rocked the fuck out for a second.
The Mighty Meadow have been consistently weaving waving tapestries of sound using only a few chords and their ear for well-placed wanks and wah-wahs for a minute now, which made them a tough act for SK to follow if they were going to do their own, new “jam thing”, but not as tough as they would have been if DM weren’t one man down. Following the recent departure of guitarist Cory Shane, the group had retool their material as a “power trio,” which left a few gaps in their dreamscapes. Don’t get me wrong, they still sounded heavy as steel overalls, but as they ran through their material without those extra licks that you pick up on when you’re, ummm, medicated, they sounded more linear. More, A to B and less Alphabet Soup. Nonetheless, the ride as fun and vibe was stoney.
I know it’s lame to call DM stoner rock, but how many other bands out there can make you *feel* seriously fucked up even when you’re stone cold (yar-har) sober? Seriously, by the time they were done with their ten-minute jam of “At Her Open Door”, my eyelids were on half-time and I to remember it was only 8:45.
SK hit a half-hour later and played for about an hour and a half. They were strong and loud. Guitarist Carrie Brownstein looked and sounded 10 feet tall, that is when she wasn’t in the air unleashing some of the best jumps and kicks since Youth Of Today. It was on some real rock show shit and given the size of the Roseland’s stage, it was exactly what was needed to cut the distance between the musicians on stage and the people in crowd. Most of the songs they played were off of the Woods, with a few oldies from Dig Me Out thrown in for good measure, making the paste-stained fingers of old school zinesters in the crowd (this writer included) very happy.
While the beginning of the set was a series of snapshots, moments in motion, the end, which was supposed to be fluid and jammy, felt too confined. As Brownstein dug in the higher registers of her SG to lay down some solos, she and the band became statue-esque. Most of the noize was feedback interspersed with some wank-lite fretboard gymnastics and yeah, it was kinna snoozy. By the time they did the third or fourth six-minute song, I couldn’t really move with them any more. I could only watch and half-listen/daydream. SK just sound better when they write riffs that sound like solos rather than vice-verse. That’s ok though, because just when I thought they were getting too big for their britches by playing a second encore, they hit me with the Ali-worthy one two punch by covering Danzig’s “Mother”, followed by “Dig Me Out”. Fuck yeah I wanna bang heads with you! And good night to you too!
Maybe my thinking cap was on too tight, but as everyone started to leave, the conclusion I came to about why so many diff kinds of cats came out to support was that both Sleater-Kinney’s and Dead Meadow’s music are excellent vehicles for the audience and the artist. You can tack on theories about feminism, post-whateverism, weedism (not a word) to their sounds, but at the end they’re all about the room moving somewhere together in the course of a show rather than the singular preoccupations of particular audience members, including critics, who are going to have their own thoughts anyway. Everyone’s a (shrug) critic, but it’s a special thing to be a fan. And fans go to big rock concerts if that’s where you fave indie group is playing.
If it wasn’t New York, I would say that everyone spilled out into the parking lot outside the venue to shoot the shit, but since it was, I’ll just say that everyone left at 10:45 thinking about who was gonna take them where next. Some of those people drive cabs, others play guitars,
