Pigs X 7 AKA Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs in Vancouver, plus Kristina Mameli, Bev Davies, and the Paranoyds

Zale, the audience member of the evening, is brought onstage by Matthew Baty

Sometimes you don't need to fully understand a band to appreciate what they do. Hell, sometimes not understanding is actually useful. And sometimes understanding, when it is present, doesn't mean that much, in the scheme of things. 

Like, I feel like I understand the Paranoyds, the opening band for PigsX7 last night at the Pearl. I sorta thought of them as "LA Witch by way of the Black Angels": hooky neo-psychedelic rock with one foot in the garage. Great! I liked them plenty, would see them again, had no questions, no qualifications. But I do have recordings of other bands (including LA Witch and the Black Angels) that will suffice to fill the need for "this kinda thing," so I snapped some photos, shot one vid ("Lizzie," which also has an agreeably retro rock video), and bought no merch from their side of the table (sorry, Paranoyds! I'm over-extended in a few directions). I did consider buying the 7" of I Like It Here, but 7" inches are something I almost never play and have no more room for.  I really like the song "I'm JK," which is not about Ms. Rowling, note. They didn't play it last night, though! 

I'd gotten into the show via Kristina Mameli (thanks, Kristina!) who had a plus one, but I'd also gone with the idea of hanging out with Bev. I had a Macbeth DVD to give her -- the Polanski -- and a couple of Straights. She was the person who first told me about Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, when they were still brand new, but she doesn't know why they call themselves that either. 

My first photo of her of the night, she looked at, then mussed her hair and had me re-take it. This is the mussed version (more Bev to come): 

Bev has a much better version of this photo (the dude stayed in this position for long enough that I couldn't resist, even though I'd seen her take one already). 

I got a couple "action shots" of Bev in the pit: 

I wonder if Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs have a large following of gay men with foot fetishes? The singer, Matt, was barefoot the whole night. He has beautiful feet, which he kept putting up on the monitor. I have not been as aware of feet during a concert since Blag Dahlia (accidentally but repeatedly) kicked me in the head (with shoes on) when stage diving at a Dwarves show at Fortune Sound Club. 

Patti Smith came to mind, too, though her use of feet is more on the merely functional side (she doesn't seem to pose them, as Matt sometimes did).  

I did not and do not fully grasp Pigs X 7 music. There are unresolved questions, ranging from, "Why does Matt dress like he's fresh from the gym?" to "How is death hilarious?" Their music is, to me, quite unpredictable and unique -- there isn't another band that sounds like them. I can see some overlap, say with something like High on Fire, who I also don't fully understand; there are probably even more relevant sludge/ stoner/ doom metal bands out there. But was I able to FEEL it? To dance around? Yes, I was. Though occasionally my mind did come back to my phone, and the impulse to document:

I liked their spirit, too. At one point, seeing me trying to snap a photo of the setlist, John Michael came over and (using his feet: it's not a theme) moved it, not further away from my inquiring phone, but out of the shadows, so I could get a better shot. Thanks, man! 

The catch about not really understanding Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs' music yet is that I have nothing at all intelligent or remotely interesting to say about it. But I did get some fun pictures. I stayed up front right til the end. I enjoyed Matt's stage patter -- about the milestone of having put out a fifth album, and the number of really good bands that didn't (he said this by way of introducing an alleged cover, but it sounded to me like he said the song was "We Like to Party" by the Vengaboys, and that simply cannot be right). 

He also offered a very funny story about a left-handed compliment he received from a fan in Poland, but though I do remember that story, I don't want to take away from anyone hearing it afresh, by commiting it to print (the "Not you, you're a fucking arsehole" one). I liked his wit; he's a hell of a frontman, bouncing around unflaggingly through the night, sometimes just staring out into the audience, almost like he's challenging them. I hope we met the challenge. 

There was one particularly fun moment late in the concert, but note the guy moshing on the left, there. He'll come up again in a second. His name, if I heard correctly, was Zale. 

The band paused and Matthew said something about how they had a contest for the audience member of the night, but that they had stopped telling people the contest existed (I guess I'm spoiling this one, though, because I need to in order to set up the photos) because it invited all sorts of distasteful macho behaviour in the pit. Matthew only mentioned it and told us the point of the contest once he was confident his bassist had made a choice. John Michael nodded, pointed into the audience, and picked a kid who promptly threw up both goats (my photo of that moment is blurry). He was then invited up onto the stage, to receive some sort of prize -- I think it was a sweatband? 

I sat out the rest of the set, after that -- only a couple more songs -- but I did grab video of a couple later ones, beginning with Matt curled up on the stage, I think for the end of the previous song. It got a bit fuzzy, where one song ended and the next began. But by the time they launched into "Collider," I was feeling hungry, and went and found Bev (I think "Collider" might have been their last song? Or maybe they did an encore? Dunno). We went for slightly strange Japanese food at a sushi place across from the venue. 

So intent was I on chatting with Bev that I forgot all about Kristina, who had gotten me into the show! But once we were in place at the Skytrain, waiting for a train to Surrey, Kristina came around the corner with a slice of pizza. So I got a few photos of her with Bev.

Apparently she has set aside some nice photos of Bev with Jack Keating, too. 

I don't think I actually have explained to Kristina about my tongue cancer ordeal, but if she thought, ever, "What's wrong with his voice," she didn't say anything. We did have a few odd communication glitches, like I asked her about Stick Men and she thought I meant the Pointed Sticks. But, I mean, they do both have "Stick" in their name! (Kristina, my tongue story is told here). 

My big realization is that Kristina is almost as tall as I am. In fact, she looks taller in this photo -- but she isn't. She's 5' 10" and something and I'm 5' 11" and something. Incidentally, I think this is a selfie; Bev also took a couple on my phone, but it was a bit challenging for her to do, one handed, so I think this one is mine:

Pigs X 7's new album is Death Hilarious. I would have bought it on vinyl if they'd had vinyl (but that would have meant sticking around to pester people to sign it; it's just as well). I would have bought the shirt, if they'd had my size. As things are, I got it on CD, and am keen to check it out again, precisely because I still do not feel I have any firm grasp on this band's music. There are definitely epic moments in there. I must investigate further.

But even if the album doesn't catch on, I sure had a fine time last night. Thanks, Pigs! Thanks, Bev! And thanks, Kristina!

Pigs X 7's bandcamp is here! 

Bev Davies photos here.

The Scammers interview and two shows! (NOW ONLY ONE!)

The Scammers blew me away... I had only a little awareness of Korean punk before I heard them... now I have a little more, which I share here:

https://www.straight.com/music/scammers-drop-korean-punk-bomb-deombyeora-deombyeo-i-gae-ssibalnomdeula-on-vancouver

I love that the hyperlink Anglicizes the Korean (a Rux title, explained in the article). I stalled just long enough in writing about it that they have a gig Sept 5 at LanaLou's (they had to pull out of the Sept 7 gig). Plus there is a lot of catchup on Korean punk, finally come to Vancouver...

Thanks to Chopper for his informative question...! 

Six band weekend: Rong, Cheap Flavor, Ylem, Sweetbeast, Chopping Spree, and the Cowboy Bebop Bebop Band

Kristy-Lee, on seeing I have a folk fest shirt on

I managed to see five bands this weekend, and to meet and interact with another, who sold me hot sauce. I also did an interview, the dishes, and the laundry. The wife was away, but I feel like it was a productive chunk of time. 

Note: I am soon to take a break from this. I won't be around for much of the rest of August. I have lots of writing to do, but not for this blog. 

But I am awake in the heat, having a pee-and-hydrate-and-pee-again break, before I attempt "sleep round two," and thought I would take a minute to report. 

The weekend began with Rong at the Tears of Joy Hot Sauce Festival out in Langley. I have written much about Rong and will have more to come presently, but let me say this: they suit a daytime hot sauce festival ambience. I danced to "Same Team" and "The Ships" and "ACT." I chatted with them. I shot video of "Run With Us," their cover tune. I learned that Kristy-Lee has a Freddy Mercury tattoo (later she explained to me that she also has a Beethoven one, and a number on her arm that reflects, if I've got this right, her father's hockey jersey number; her brother has a matching one, which they got after he passed). 

Also at that festival, I bought hot sauce off Cheap Flavor. They asserted that they were the only band who made their own hot sauce from scratch and I said, "What about Bison?" and they responded with a haughty, "Do they grow their own peppers?"

I somehow do not think Bison grow their own peppers.

Cheap Flavor is a better name for a band than it is a name for a hot sauce, but I did not see them perform, alas (their set had taken place by the time Beeman and I arrived). Their sauce, however, while not especially cheap, is absolutely delicious. It's especially good in guac; it has an agreeably fruity zip to it, with pineapple among the non-pepper ingredients. When I heard it was a hot sauce festival that Rong was playing at, I had hoped to get a mango sauce, but all the ones I tried, from different vendors, were adulterated with things like tamarind or ginger or turmeric or so forth. I want my mango to taste like mango, damn it! 

Tamarind does just fine in a tamarind sauce; blend it with mango and you have something that tastes like barf. I did not buy that hot sauce. 

But truth is, it wasn't a sample Cheap Flavor proferred that sold me: I bought the Cheap Flavor sauce because I had liked what I heard online of their music and wanted to have some interaction with the band (and had run out of hot-sauce-shopping time, and wanted to have one sauce to speak of for the day). Agreeably, it turns out, of the various hot sauces I sampled, theirs is actually the closest to the sweet, light, fruity hot sauce I had hoped to find. 

Emilor of Rong -- she of the keen eye for tornados; see aforesaid vid -- told her own hot sauce story, which involved a nameless fellow member of a past band buying dollar-store hot sauce and re-labeling it. She did not name the band, but declaimed, "That's capitalism!" 

But so is Cheap Flavor -- capitalism of a much higher order. I wonder if they drop the "Canadian U" from their name because they have designs for their hot sauce in American markets? Go, Cheap Flavor, go!

Ylem

Later that night I ended up at Bully's for Ylem and Sweetbeast. Both were great. Ylem, whose name rhymes with phylum, not feel'em, started out reminding me of early 70's Pink Floyd and ended up covering All Them Witches' "When God Comes Back," but I had to ask the band what the song was. Everyone else at Bully's knew it -- younger kids with more hair, abundant tattoos, and visible muscle tone, for the most part. It wasn't entirely my kinda crowd, but I got lost in the music no less, just as I'd hoped. There was one song in particular where Ylem pulled off this massive shift in tempo that made every stoned person in the audience go "Whoaaaa," like your consciousness suddenly slipped into a lower gear, or maybe even reverse, dropping you down into your seat and causing some drool to emerge from your  mouth. Or maybe that was just me? 

Sweetbeast presented with a slightly more Southern-Fried visual aesthetic. I enjoyed what they did too, but shot vid in lieu of wanting to describe it. They'd do well on a bill with Black Wizard, if Black Wizard ever plays again! 

I want to see a few more shows at Bully's before they shut down operations. The last couple I've been to have seemed so successful that I wonder if they'll reconsider? There's a scene happening there, and it's a cool one. They have an all-day metal event on August 16th that I won't be at, but...

I left shortly after Moonbather went on. They had a great t-shirt but they were playing too loud for my middle-aged-ears, with some notes causing my eardrums to cringe in pain. Just as I had failed to bring sunscreen to Rong, I had failed to pack earplugs to Bully's. Soon, I began to think of how much I wanted pizza, and how lonely my cat must be. 

Had a pleasant interaction with the girls at the New West Station Fresh Slice, two of 'em from India: "You have corn on your pizza!"

"We're the only ones!"

"I lived in Japan for awhile, and that's a thing there, corn on pizza. Is it a thing in India?"

They said it was. But their butter chicken pizza was better. I must say, the Indian-ification of Fresh Slice has vastly improved that chain. I no longer think of them as a last resort. I actually will look around, sometimes, when I am hungry, with the thought, "Is there a Fresh Slice near here?"

I considered heading back to Bully's after that, but like I say, I had a lonely cat to come home to, so home I came. 

Sunday saw me take in two bands at the Pearl. Chopping Spree were the more curious of the two, in that they had elected to draw for musical inspirations on a genre of light 70s jazz that reminded me of late night TV talk show big bands, the Barney Miller soundtrack, and maybe bands like Spyro Gyra: stuff that I would normally dismiss as pastel wallpaper soft-rock shlock, with an edge of mainstream smooth jazz like you'd expect a conservative college to teach their students in the 1980s: music made by people from a universe where punk rock never happened. 

This is not my universe, I assure you. But the thing that was both fascinating and maddening about Chopping Spree is that they were fucking fantastic at this. They totally engaged  with a completely banal style of jazz and fucking COOKED in delivering it. By the time they had hooked into a rocking, proggy "Night in Tunisia," I was kind of converted and deeply confused. Then they ended their set with something that I thought was Dick Dale's "Misirlou" but which Tim Reinert assured me was Duke Ellington's "Caravan." I refuse to spend much time A-Bing those songs to see if there are actual musical similarities, but fill your boots. Reinert no doubt is right!

Oh, and: asked-and-answered: the weird animated doppleganger thing is a Pearl thing, not a JP Carter thing. Good to know!

Chopping Spree left me asking the biggest questions of the weekend, like, is this how someone becomes a crotchety old man: the culture that you knew beyond a doubt sucked hard when you were 15, that you were convinced was the absolute nadir of human expression at that time, ends up trickling down through the decades to influence kids who weren't even born until you were in your mid-20s, who don't know that people of a previous generation thought that music sucked, who hear it with fresh ears and do something authentic and cool with it, thereby leaving the 50-and-up contingent in their audience struggling with their inability to evaluate what they are seeing... think about it enough and your head will collapse... 

Suffice to say, the crowd at the Pearl loved them, but they loved the Cowboy Bebop Bebop Band (which shared some members) even more.

Truth is, I also felt somewhat on the outside of the enthusiastic reaction the band was receiving; the people who loved it most were obviously plugged into a communion that is not intended for one such as I, grooving with them on a level I could not, much as I enjoyed what they did. Apparently EVERYTHING THEY DO, Reinert told me later, is drawn from the soundtrack to this single TV series, which seems only to have a had a short run, but that has made a lasting impact no less. Wikipedia explains that

Cowboy Bebop has been hailed as one of the best television series of all time. It was a critical and commercial success both in Japanese and international markets, most notably in the United States. It garnered several major anime and science fiction awards upon its release, and received acclaim from critics and audiences for its style, characters, story, voice acting, animation, and soundtrack. The English dub was particularly lauded and is regarded as one of the best anime English dubs. Credited with helping to introduce anime to a new wave of Western viewers in the early 2000s, Cowboy Bebop has also been called a gateway series.

I don't know the first fucking thing about Cowboy Bebop. Reinert compared it to our attachment to something like Looney Tunes -- a cultural comfort food for a certain contingent. I observed of the number they were playing as we chatted that it reminded me of the (fantastic) soundtrack for The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3 and he responded with an apt observation about Henry Mancini -- hell, yeah! -- but I think the girls singing and dancing in the audience probably associated them most with, well, Cowboy Bebop. 

I shot vid of them, too, including a few peeks into the adoring crowd, happily singing along with all the, uh, meows. It was so fun that I would actually consider seeing them again: turns out I didn't have to understand it at all to still totally enjoy myself.