The Crime Syndicate

The Hammer Museum, July 23, 2009 -

The night began like most others in L.A.; we sat in traffic. My friend Krystof was trying to figure out why his iPhone didn’t sound right playing through my car speakers. I wasn’t paying too much attention – I was busy checking my work e-mail on my phone while driving and attempting to explain a lecture I’d been listening to during my morning commute on the nature of memory by some guy named John Steele (a random Pirate Bay download). Little did I know how prophetic it would turn out to be. From Wikipedia, “While his work is often closely related to the psychology of fragrance, in talks and writings Steele also explores Buddhism, Vedic culture, the great yugas, geomancy and geomantic amnesia, geobiology, time out of balance, shamanism, the effects of geological formations on human consciousness, cross state retention, and the importance of sacred sites and spaces.” That could easily be a review of the new Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros record.

Part of a fashionable non-movement of “Hippiesters”, Edward Sharpe is a collection of ex-hipsters who have seemingly become spiritually enlightened, which only time will prove or disprove. If you’ve ever attended Agape church in Los Angeles – and if you’re plugged in to celebrity culture at all you’ve heard of it – then you’ll know the vibe (by the way, the “church” is very much worth going to at least once – http://www.agapelive.com/). There are lots of people in hippy-like fashionable garb driving home in Mercedes, Bentleys and on custom Harleys.

The band is fronted by Alex Ebert, of Ima Robot, and consists of members of various L.A.-based bands. It also has a former American Apparel chick Jade Castrinos…but I haven’t been able to confirm any American Apparel photos, just that she worked for them and was a fixture of the LA hipster scene of the mid-2000’s. But why all this background for a show review? That’s part of the deal, are they for real or not? Perhaps the suspicion arises because of the fact that Alex Ebert used to wear eyeshadow, or the connection to major Hollywood stars, or the fact that there were about a hundred onlookers behind the stage all wearing extremely expensive clothes and not dancing. Whatever the case the music is fun, a lot of fun, and that’s probably why at the end of the day none of the “why” actually matters. And to see it relatively new, before the flood, was a treat.

I won’t speak about the opening band Eskimo Hunter, it isn’t fair to them. I wasn’t there to see a cross between My Bloody Valentine and whatever else they are supposed to be so after doing my best to get into them I spent the rest of their set checking out the strange mix of people that Edward Sharpe had brought out. There were raver kids, hipsters, hippies, bro’s, adults, film industry people and an unusually large amount of high-school kids, which might have something to do with the Alex Ebert/Ima Robot connection. The place was packed – people were everywhere – but because of our connection with Capt. AKAK we were able to get right up next to the stage.

Once the one-man sound crew began setting up for Edward Sharpe you could see how fucking cool this show was going to be – piano, tambourine, a xylophone, an accordion, a trumpet, synths, 2 guitars, bongos, drums and several vocal mics. After a long time – there was one guy setting up the microphones – the band came on stage, all twelve of them. They began the set with “Janglin’” a quasi sing-along that essentially defines the band – feet stomping rhythm, lyrics about spiritual redemption, and a lot of ass shaking.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros are if nothing else a great party band. Everyone in the group is into the music and into the feeling that it elicits in the audience – you can’t help but have fun. Any cynicism or coolness you came to the show with quickly evaporates – if you don’t believe me by the end of the show I was on the stage after someone shouted “Can we get on the stage?” and Alex said “Yes, just don’t break anything.” And I don’t do those things.

But this gets back to the question – are these guys for real? Do they mean what they’re singing about and the vibe that they put off? There is the definite feeling of a spiritual movement, of proselytizing, of doing things differently. They’re like a traveling religious show. Alex Ebert wears all white, is barefoot, and holds hands with people in the crowd while he sings. His first words to the crowd were the cryptic, “I had a paleolithic egg around my heart, I’ve broke it off.” The members of the band look at you in the eye and smile, after the show everyone in the band comes out and hangs out with the audience. Krystof was able to talk with Jade (although he couldn’t bring himself to confess his feelings for her). It’s like everyone was a member of some new-age church and decided to start a band; there’s a distinct lack of guile. At the end of the show we saw the accordion player getting picked up by her Mom.

Ryan McGinley is a New York photographer and the guy who took the photo above, you probably know who he is. When asked about his pictures he said, “My photographs are a celebration of life, fun, and the beautiful. They are a world that doesn’t exist. A fantasy in which freedom is real. There are no rules. They are of the life I wish I was living.” Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros probably fall into that category. They’re a mixture of the real and not real, of a staged experience and the authentic, they evoke possibilities beyond our own inevitable ones. And for that they point to the world we all crave.

(note: from a friend in Los Angeles)

Los Angeles, CA – 06/11/09

I don’t know if it’s because I’d been working for what felt like five years straight without a day off and I’d just come to the realization or if it was because I was extremely tired, maybe both, but the Handsome Furs were transcendent.

The Monolators opened for them and weren’t. They played their Queers-esque songs too fast and didn’t seem like they practiced much. They also seemed to have no dark side.

The Cinnamon Band were more interesting – they were like the Jayhawks if everyone except the drummer and guitar player had contracted swine flu and croaked and the 2 remaining members were on the “memorial tour”. The two of them drank Tecate after Tecate the entire set and sang esoteric songs about growing up in the South. The drummer seemed like a maudlin drunk. However, they had some good drawling harmonies and some of the songs weren’t too bad.

Then the Handsome Furs began setting up and it became immediately apparent that like baseball there is a stratum in music – some people are born to play and others are doing it because they just really want to. Dan Boekner was born to fucking rock.

I listened to Big Black intermittently in High School mostly because they had the angriest lyrics of all-time. That was the only other rock band that I’ve heard where a drum machine was featured as the entire percussion section. Yes, there’s been the Postal Service and others, but no one has rocked out like Big Black, until Dan Boekner bought his first Alesis.

There is a definite William Gibson vibe to Handsome Furs; the feeling that if you walked outside the club it would be drizzling a cold acid rain on a population of androids and their leather-clad human masters. It’s an interesting counterpart to the mostly anti-technology/sad-state-of-modern-culture lyrics but the drum machine, the synth and the odd movements and coked-out appearance of his wife made for a decidedly post-apocalyptic evening.

Alexei Perry is certainly playing a part on-stage but if there’s even a shred of reality in her appearance and actions then she’s definitely a drug-user and probably borderline-schizophrenic, which is probably why I find her attractive. During the show she alternated between grinding her teeth, licking her lips and rubbing her nose and making weird jaw contortions. Dan didn’t seem similarly afflicted, just like he’d been up for several days and now really needed a nap.

In between songs Alexei would run around the stage and do big butterfly thank-you’s with her arms – she’d put her hands on her chest and then throw her arms out to the audience. During songs she would stand on one leg and pirouette and then other times do Muppet-esque dancing with her arms while attending to the drum machine and synth. I wouldn’t be harping on this if it wasn’t such a compelling sight. The tableaux made you really want to go hang out with both of them after the show. You felt like Dan would be sitting in a chair in an old dingy hotel room with a bottle of whiskey and a cigarette while Alexei was in the bathroom snorting cocaine cut with comet so you could really feel the burn. He’d then make some offer like, “if you want to fuck her tonight go ahead, I can’t get it up anymore.”

That’s obviously an exaggeration but I’m not kidding, there was a palpable sense of danger and enlightened decadence that they exuded. But oh yeah, the music was good too. They only played one song off of the first album, Plague Park, the rest being songs from the relatively newly released Face Control.

Having heard the first two bands, and a lot of other mediocre bands at other shows and on records, it helps to make plain the fact that in many ways true talent is a natural phenomenon, is born. While the other bands were sincere, probably practiced more than the Handsome Furs and had some good songs, it was like a different kind of human had landed when the Handsome Furs started in on their set.

And this wasn’t even the best that I’ve heard them play. They seemed tired and a little crazed, but they still played an incredible set of modern music, music to watch the world crumble to.