City Of Ships – Ash Street – Nov 15, 2009
I was very lucky to have visited SCRAP recently and picked up a handful of disposable earplugs. This east coast power trio was LOUD. I mean, I go to a lot of shows so I know volume when I hear it…they’ve got the volume part covered.
When this band was setting up the bass player started hitting some seriously distorted notes and I knew I was in for something interesting…if not necessarily good… He played with a number of effects from time to time, but it was always set to buzzsaw mode. The bass also seemed to be the driving force behind the excess volume.
The drummer looked to have a huge kick drum which he put to good effect…especially when he hit a switch and it lit up bright white for the whole set.
The singer/guitarist was sporting the ironic “D.A.R.E.” t-shirt which was pretty funny like 15 years ago… He also played in buzzsaw mode with effects. The singing was a lot of Cobainesque screaming and groaning.
The tunes themselves were frequently too busy for the instrumentation. There was a lot of arppegiating happening in the bass that was just impossible to distinguish. When you throw a shit-ton of distortion on bass then start picking arpeggios and chords on it…it ends up sounding like a rats nest of fuzz…totally lacking drive, groove, and definition. I like distortion on bass when it’s done right, but it was just too much.
The bass and guitar also had some tapping sections which came off to me as being inserted just to show off the tapping chops. The bass player played like a guitar player that got stuck on bass in this band. No idea if that’s true or not, but his playing didn’t fill the bass role as much as this music would have liked.
There were also a couple of spots where the dynamic came way down to the guitar picking some chords that seemed out of place…like they were kind of bolted onto the song…they did not work.
This band was at their best during the few times they locked in and bludgeoned us with power riffs… It would have been a lot more fun to just get pounded in the forehead with those sections rather than having to try to mentally untangle the cacophonic overplaying sections.
Now, I’m not sure if any of you have ever been around a large pipe bomb explosion…or any BIG guns. In the instant following that kind of detonation it always seems like there is a miniature vacuum of sound which is pure warm silence…there was a moment like that when their set ended. Everyone stood for a moment in stunned semi-paralysis, recovering from the auditory beating we had just received. Then there was some applause that was hard to hear through ringing ears…
