Get on the Gravy Train
The coarsely forceful, thoughtfully rocky indie band Bridez will join the lascivious, latex-decked, lewd-core techno troupe Gravy Train!!!! at 8 p.m., Tuesday at The Echo. Pitchfork’s review of Gravy Train!!!!’s 2003 album Hello Doctor analogizes that the band is to music as John Waters is to film. Well, the wryly macabre comedy, well-crafted satire and death’s head sardonicism are far less frequent with Gravy Train!!!!, and there is decidedly less shit-eating in their act. So far. Still, there remain similarities to be drawn between the dark-kitsch filmmaker and the deliriously sex-hungry band.
Taboo is outside the lexicon of both Waters and Gravy Train!!!! (the four exclamation marks serve to differentiate them from that other, far less fabulous Gravy Train) and, the work of both artists frequently involves reversed, foggy, or eschewed gender roles and unabashed wallowing in sexuality, in its grungier flavors.
The terrifically trashy Waters did this in Pink Flamingos with the grandiloquently flamboyant prattling of the drag-empress Divine. The Oakland-based queercore quartet do it today with their raunchy ménage-a-trois masterpiece Double Decker Supreme.
Okay, so, admittedly, as with Waters’ cinematic sensibilities, a lot of the worth of the electrotrash O.G.s is in their campiness and carnal candor. This voracious pubescent prurience never fades, and almost every one of their songs is sexually explicit. Nubile vocals – sometimes falsetto, sometimes rap, sometimes spoken word – sputter and mix with simplistic Casiofunk and old-school synth punch-ups to make for lustfully throbbing tumescence.
They’re tawdry, they’re candid, they’re profane, and they’re gratuitous, but one thing that Gravy Train!!!! have unequivocally to their credit is their guilelessness and marked lack of self-consciousness and sense of self-importance. Fun-loving and frank – usually to the point of vulgarity – they don’t take themselves too seriously. This alone is notable in a market currently swollen with pretentious, occasionally incomprehensible art rockers.
More in the vein of lo-fi alt-rockers like Times New Viking, Bridez plays handball against a familiar wall-of-skronk. The band lacquers their otherwise straight-ahead indie approach with static-y vocals, blown-amp guitars and cascading crashes of percussion. Tinny power-noise fugues swirl with infectiously rusty hooks for an overall sound that is dissonant enough to repel trendy scene-pop kids while maintaining an approachability contingent upon the listener’s willingness to hear Bridez out.
All this coagulates into an acquired taste whose bitter-tinged noise fades into a savory sonic bouquet, gamy and oddly chewable. As for social ambience, bring a set of brass knuckles and a pack of condoms; there’s equal probability that an orgy or a moshpit could break out at any point during the show. Lucky you.
Published: 06/25/2008
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
