Future of the Left @ Grog Shop, Cleveland

Future of the Left
Setlist (rough order):

• Arm Eritrea
• Chin Music
• adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood,
• Beneath the Waves, an Ocean
• Small Bones, Small Bodies
• Sheena is a T-Shirt Salesman
• Manchasm
• Failed Olympic Bid
• You Need Satan More Than He Needs You
• To Hell With Good Intentions
• Robocop 4
• Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues
• Lapsed Catholics + I Trusted You (total 10m20s)

I think it makes sense to start at the end. Just like the final tracks of every mclusky / FotL album thus far, Lapsed Catholics has a little bit of something extra in it. What we read as complexity, as layered meanings, as the depth of the music, lies completely in the intro: when you hear the song cut off from the intro, you're left with an excited 3 (maybe 4) note melody with inspiringly uninspired structure. And it can just keep going, like "I Trusted You" just keeps going. It's a massive joke of media, something that postmodern theorists could dismantle than I could. The onstage antics (I remember little except the drum kit moving to the other side of the stage, Jimmy (Mr. "play guitar and act like a fucking maniac") stage-kissing an adolescent, and Julia playing bass. But was all (a) appropriate to the crowd (there were a few chants of "anal sex" from shitty dudebros in the back) and (b) much appreciated and reciprocated. It was 10m20s (better than NYC's 7m48s, if Falco can be believed, which he can't) of a sharing that had been going on all along from an up-front crowd of devoted fans and a mid-section of excited dilettantes of shit rock.

There's an element of absurdism to all of their music. Not just absurdism in the Monty Python or randominternet sense, but in the theatrical sense: carefully crafted, inevitable, often disturbingly engrossing absurdism. What first turned me off from The Plot Against Common Sense was how explicit it got against its targets, or how limp certain conclusions are (I cite "Beneath The Waves, An Ocean," to which I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt, but from which I'm still getting  little but an unexciting invitation to clap your hands); repeated listens are helping to unearth the gems, which are many, and to try to reveal some deeper layers. But I think I'm also butting up against my expectations not just of what, but of how I expect their indirectness to function. Of course if you drop a bandmate and add two more things are going to start working differently. Sometimes I think the band's ceaseless use of ironic distance is the epitome of everything I hate about musical culture, positive cathedrals of irony...and then Lapsed Catholics. Just, simple as shit. Listen to what's there.

It helped to have a small but devoted crowd. The AJJ crowd was everyone but some drunks and me asleep in the corner (having exhausted myself singing along and kicking men out of the pit), and the audience space got pretty unsafe. A good pit is contained, not a swaying wreck of shin-bruising person-trampling madness. And I think the band loved Cleveland's rowdyness, as articulated by the vanguard front row but wholeheartedly enjoyed by the rest of the crowd. It allowed the crowd interaction to be as sleek and quick as their music and the turns it takes.

This was a long set for an opening band, doing a lot of old stuff in a tour for a new record that's getting shit all over the place. Talking to Jack later, apparently it's getting exhuasting to be pulling the new stuff all over the place; I hope that's not a function of audiences not responding to the songs, or getting disappointed. I'll admit, getting to hear the band play two mclusky songs and my favorites from Curses and Travels (except for "Plague of Onces" and "Drink Nike," rest their souls) was a once-in-a-lifetime treat, but a touring band deserves to work, apply, and get reception for material that represents who they are now. Not that they aren't owning everything. I got vague word that they're continuing to write and that something might come out from them next year.

But throughout, every track, every second of that wonderful night: pseudo cockrock; explicit and implicit moments of theater; hooks and patterns accessible to new listeners and hypnotic to old; wild work at high tempos and mesmerizing work at low; carefully uncrafted stage banter; and much much else, but it all seems to center back on rock'n'roll.