I had set my hopes up pretty high for the Blood Brothers show, that I have just seen yesterday evening with my good pal Martin, bassman and soundplayer extraordinaire. Sure, their latest album was laden with studio gimmickry but I was too distracted by the goodness of March On Electric Children and especially Burn Piano Island, Burn, and also the seemingly fine concert glimpses caught on digital files scopped up from the Innernet.
So I took great care in not getting overdosed with BB songs before heading to the venue, the sucky El Salon on Saint-Laurent in good ol' Montreal.
Martin and me were not sure anymore about the exact location, as being both soon old farts we could not even remember a place we have been to only a couple of months ago. Anyhoo, spotting the numerous posers and all-dressed-alike girls, we crossed the most overhyped street in North America to check the excitement. Martin had a Beck bottle hidden in his coat so he decided to chug that down before entering our night's ticket. The speakers started blaring the music of Big Business, we were sort of not really figuring out what it was but after Martin put his beer away, we got in, gave our pink stubs, got stamped and tried to appreciate the set, or what was left of it anyway, as we heard only three and a half songs.
Big Business is a duo of two burly characters, one bass player ad one drummer. The most significant number in that act is the drummer, whose kit was arranged so close to the guy I was afraid he'd miss a beat and impale his eye with a drumstick. He smashed his pieces pretty good and the whole sound was a mix of Cosmic Psychos and Killdozer, sans guitar, of course. The last song they played sounded flat-out like a Melvins cover, though. But I can't judge a set with only three songs and a half, so...
Next up was Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower. I had heard only one song from them and it didn't really catch me so I decided to leave it at that and ignore the hype of the few posters I had seen around the city.
First off, let me get this straight before I start ranting about their "performance". A band that has a soundcheck about as lengthy as their music set is not a real band, or it is a band with no sense of empathy for the audience, coupled with a blatant ignorance of rules of music. For me, a soundcheck is, if you're the drummer, hit on the snare until you get the sound right, then hit on each tom (front and floor) then tap on the cymbal, then do a little ditty for a few seconds to see if the whole thing sounds OK mixed together, while the soundman tries to ajust the sound produced by the aforementioned hitting. If you're a guitar or bass player, tune your gear (by ear or with a fork) and then proceed with doodling while checking if the amp works and if the monitors (the big boxes on the floor in front of bands are NOT shelves to put fake chanel handbags and/or cheap leatherette-so-i-look-like-someone-straight-out-of-the-Eighties jacket) play the same thing you hear on your amp.
I mean, this shouldn't take you more than, what, 15 minutes?
So Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower guys come up on stage... I don't know what the purpose of those red badges were, and I don't want to know. But as soon as I saw those little badges, an alarm in my head went off and me and Martin looked at ourselves with the "Uh, oh..." glance like when someone tries to stagedive from an amp while flat-out drunk. I know from experience that ANY "prop" (as Martin likes to call those accessories) are usually there to DETRACT the attention of the audience from the fact that the band's music is either boring, badly executed or that it just plain sucks.
And when the Nation Of Ulysses wannabes started to "play" they immediately fell in the third category.
PTBTET (Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower) is one of the lamest bands I have seen live (and I have seen many) and their show earns a great big ZERO.
Inept playing, no presence, lots of posing, no song structure, no excitement, not a single GROOVE to hook up to, and every time the "singer' started to blurt out noises through his saxophone, I cringed and wished I was somewhere up in Alaska running away from a famined Polar Bear. Actually, the ONLY moment when I thought, for a few milliseconds, that I would hear something interesting, was when the "singer" started a "duel" with the guitar, trying to engage in a dialogue, until I was again struck hard (and i do mean full-face) with the reality that these guys do not know how to play with each other.
The crowd was also getting bored at some point. Maybe that's why people were paying more attention to the trash in the middle of the floor or they were taking pictures of themselves instead of the band. Either that or I was in the middle of the most narcisstic bunch of kids on Earth. Or maybe both.
So Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower gives us the relief of leaving the stage, allowing us to witness another glimpse of "How Not To Act When In a Band" with the drummer taking time to change his to clothes from a tacky country-western style vest to a sleeve-cut striped tee. Dude, just TAKE CARE OF YOUR GEAR, THE OTHER BAND IS WAITING FOR YOU TO CLEAR THE STAGE. Ever hear of the word "dressing-room"? Of the difference between 'backstage' and 'on stage'?
So we wait another half-hour, while the Blood Brothers try to set up their gear; I notice that the boys and the girls in the crowd have pretty much all the same hairdo. The Eighties are coming back and some girls think that looking exactly llike Ozzy Osbourne's daughter is a good thing. I must have lost my sense of irony. Or I must be getting old. Meh, a little bit of both.
After an approximate soundcheck where the two screamers were not sure how much juice was put in their respective mikes, the band finally started their set with the blistering Beautiful Horses, a song from their new album. Although playing their songs about 1.3 times faster than on the CDs, Blood Brothers didn't get their act quite together until halfway through, when the bass player finally landed back on this planet and arranged his gizmo so that it worked out the accordion sounds. By that time, both singers/screamers finally had equal power in each of their microphones. The BBrothers successfully skimmed through their recording career, playing good songs from March On Electric Children (like Birth Skin /Death Leather) and Burn Piano Island, Burn (like Cecilia and The Silhouette Saloon) but most of their set was of course dedicated to their latest, Crimes. Which was part of a big technical problem since that album relies more on studio gimmickry than the previous ones, making the transition to a live rendition a but difficult. Some of the better renditions were the songs Crimes and the excellent Rats and Rats and Rats For Candy, where the interplay of both vocalists finally came through. The show would have been bra (that's 'good' in Swedish) if not for the encore where guitar player Cody Votolato was wished a happy birthday for the umpteenth time (even Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower had done that already) and the BBrothers dished out a terrible medley of Queen songs... what a waste of talent.
So the final verdict is 0/10 for Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower. Don't bother buying records of these guys, if you want good agitprop punk go and buy old Dead Kennedys records or Nation Of Ulysses.
For Blood Brothers, they get a 6.5/10, which is about the same note I would give their latest album. Good but not great. They would have got a 6 but since the soundman in El Salon was part of the problem, I take that in consideration.