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In
the Dark of the Night (Industrial Bands Are Playing)
By: Meredith Vacek (Lawrencerock.com Editor) |
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Oct.
31- Kansas City industrial enthusiasts were delighted to hear local
and traveling bands playing their favorite music in celebration of Halloween.
The night started at El Torreon with Kansas City’s own Necrovox,
a one-man outfit that had never really played live before. Justin, dressed
as an elderly man, the mastermind behind this project, was lent moral
and musical support onstage by his friend Dave, dressed in a Swiss military
uniform, who played additional guitar. Justin sang the few lyrics, played
bass, and attempted to run the sampler that had prerecorded beats and
sounds. Things didn’t go so well, the “band” (he and
Dave) not having practiced much and the sampler malfunctioning. Necrovox
showed promise though, with dark, clangy beats, passionate wails on
Justin’s part, and a fierce techno/rock-fused sound. Friends and
fans, who had already heard the music before on cd, hold hope that the
band will tighten up its act and soon create an impressive live show. After
Necrovox came Soda Ash, a goth/industrial band out of Columbia, MO.
This band consisted of five members, the sexy female lead singer who
also played a keyboard, two guitarists, a bassist, and a drummer. The
drum kit was impressive with eight drums and four cymbals, and was played
excellently by the band’s female drummer, who, appearing to be
in her forties or fifties, outranked all of her bandmates significantly
in age. This proved to be completely irrelevant to the quality of the
band’s playing. As far as overall sound, Soda Ash was a needle
jumping all over the dial. They ranged from goth to ambient to industrial
to metal, and from slow and drudgy to fast-paced and intense. The rest
of the band remained mostly motionless as the singer danced, cavorted,
and acted-out some of the songs. Her voice poured out onto the more
dreamy songs as though the music was winding its way up from the netherworld.
When the speed picked up in later songs, she didn’t refrain from
emotionally yelling out the lyrics. The band included sounds such as
a pounding industrial pulse, church organ keyboards, death metal-like
guitar, and irregular, wild beats on the drums. Though overall a good
show, they ended their songs messily, and the volumes of their instruments
didn’t seem correctly balanced. They received hearty cheers as
they left the stage anyway, because they had put on a fun, diverse,
exhilarating show. At
this point, El Torreon had to shut down because of curfew laws, and
so the show moved a few blocks away to someone’s house. Yet to
play was Synchro Nine Factor, an industrial band that had traveled up
from Atlanta, Georgia. Using all the tried and true industrial trademarks,
i.e.. vocal samples, effects on the singer’s voice, relying heavily
on keyboards, and stirring in their own extras, the band came out with
a winning batch of cookies. There were two keyboards, a sampler, and
two guitars. These instruments were played by three men, and a fourth
did the singing. In addition to audio, Synchro Nine Factor catered also
to their audience’s visual needs, using an image superimposed on
a flashing old tv, a poem flashing across an LED message scroller, and
a slideshow playing against a back wall. The style of the music bouncing
from techno/industrial to metal/industrial, the band can be likened
to a less fleshed-out nineties Skinny Puppy. On their only release to
date, “Right Wing Conspiracy,” from 1999, the sound seems
hang somewhere in-between. Half the material played that night was taken
from this release, and half of it was unrecorded material soon to go
on a new album. Using eerie echo effects on the microphone, Nelson Hagood,
the singer, would often fall to his knees or writhe on the floor during
the performance as though overcome with the dark thoughts contained
in the lyrics. His clear, sinister voice ringing out amongst the thumping
beats of the music, and samples of other people speaking, such as “Murder
is caused by human beings,” take the listener into the band’s
dark chasm of dissatisfaction with their personal lives and with American
life in general. From the enthusiastic crowd response after each song,
it became obvious that they were going over quite well, even though
the numbers of the crowd left something to be desired. In total, there
were probably fewer than twenty people in the audience. What can be
done? The scene for industrial music is small and fragmented. The small
numbers didn’t daunt the band, who played with enthusiasm and impressed
their listeners. As they were wrapping up their set, audience members
kept begging them to keep playing. After Synchro Nine Factor was finally
allowed to finish, they commented on how glad they were to have been
able to play for the Kansas City crowd, despite the small numbers. For
more information about Synchro Nine Factor, go to www.mp3.com/SynchroNineFactor
. For more information about Soda Ash, go to www.sodaashband.com .
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