Okay, real quick, because I think I am the only person who cares. The Ariel Pink show was FUCKING OUT OF CONTROL. They played with Cass McCombs and did one set of Ariel stuff with Cass on stage with them and then a second set of Cass stuff with Ariel on stage. I guess the majority of the band was Ariel's usual band. First of all, he is seriously TINY. He looks like a tiny little pocket monkey. As in, he looks like a monkey and you could fit him in your pocket easily. I was expecting tall and lanky for some reason. Also he is very scrunched up and intenese and tense looking in the shoulders. He is cute though. REALLY greasy hair. The band were cool - the bassist looked exactly like Chainsaw from Summer School (what are eggs?) and one of the guitarists who was also the main tamborine dude looked more like Rod/Todd Flanders then any human being I have ever seen. Anyway so they finally get started and it's like this wall of sound, Phil Spector style, beautiful 60s jangly guitars, very Byrds and Beach Boys but also very disco and new wave but just super intense. Wall of sound is the best I can do. It was so weird because his stuff is so lo fi when you listen to the recordings but this was probably among the fullest, most beautiful sound I have ever heard. It seriously got inside of me and came out of my ears and nose. Bunches and my two friends who joined me, who ranged from skeptical to hadn;t ever heard of him, were all really impressed, so it wasn't just me and my weird Ariel Pink obsession. His voice is amazing. His pants kept falling down. Dude is definitely WEIRD but charming in a tiny greasy way. He seemed really different from his videos and interviews though.
So they played about 8 songs and then announced they were taking a break and having a drink and smoke and coming back out to play more. Well, they came back out and it was tte biggest about face I have ever witnessed, a total 180. It was chaos - totla disarray, amps getting blown out, and when they finally got a song underway, Ariel was standing there with his guitar while Cass was singing, and I guess he was supposed to sing too, but he just kind of scooted the guitar around so that he could rest his chin on it and nodded the fuck off. Seriously, I haven't seen anyone that smacked out since I woke myself up to catch my reflection in my knife at a dinner party at a Portugese restaurant in Newark in 1997 and thought "Damn, I gotta stop doing this shit. I 'm acting like Boy George at Live Aid!" (I did stop, fyi. A long time ago, so there.) Yeah, it was nuts. He fell asleep right there on stage. I felt like I had been magically transported back to the 90s. I mean, who the fuck is still doing heroin??? In 2007??? He managed to shake it off a little but it was obvious that things were only going to get worse and Cass was kind of dull after Ariel (okay, really dull but that is a hard act to follow). So 5 stars for the first half and 4 for the second, but the second set of stars is awarded according to different criteria, like being scarily fucked up.
Oh and the crowd was probably the weirdest I have ever seen. This shit made a Danielson Famile show seem like the American Music Awards.
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