When I first saw
Merchandise almost a year ago, I was blown away. I'd
never heard of them before, but they were the best band I saw on that
day at Fun Fun Fun Fest (except for maybe
Television,
naturally). I forgot about them for several months afterwards until I
re-read the review and saw the imperative I'd left for myself to buy
one of their albums. I immediately bought their second album,
Children of Desire (2012), and it didn't take me long to get
Totale Nite (2013). I purchased the "Begging for Your
Life / In the City Lights" single as soon as it was released a
few months ago and picked up After the End when it came out a
few weeks ago. I can't get enough of them. When I heard they were
coming to Austin, I immediately bought a ticket.
Artist: Merchandise
Venue: Red 7 (inside)
Location: Austin, Texas
Date: 23 September 2014
Opening Acts:
Institute, Lower
Setlist:
01. Corridor →
01. Corridor →
02. Enemy
03. In the City Light
04. Green Lady
05. In Nightmare Room
06. True Monument
07. Telephone
08. Little Killer
09. After the End
10. Anxiety's Door →
11. Totale Nite
Like many of the
smaller venues around Red River and 6th Street, exactly what bands
play on any given night, and what time they will hit the stage, is
often left unknown or unannounced until the doors open. At a place
like Red 7, where the doors usually don't open until 9pm, and bands
get added the bill with no apparent notice, this can mean a headliner
doesn't hit the stage until midnight. For those that have things to
do in the morning, this can be quite frustrating. Nonetheless, for a
band that I really like, I'll still do it on occasion, especially
when tickets are just $12. (However, there have been times when I've
had to say no, even after already buying a ticket.)
So on this occasion I
found myself at the venue a few minutes after 9pm, unaware of the set
times until I walked in the door. Seeing it would be an hour until
the first of two opening acts I'd never heard of, I settled into a
corner with my book. Bauhaus
and Joy Division came through the PA, presaging the
music to come.
First up was Institute,
an Austin punk/post-punk band. They played a noisy, aggressive
20-minute set with just enough nuance and musicality to keep me from
retreating to the corner. The singer clearly wanted to be a punk; his
band perhaps preferred something marginally more sophisticated. The
band held it together fine, except for the bassist's amp going out on
the last song, unrepaired until the singer stormed off stage at the
end of the song. The singer was on some sort of weird trip; he had
some kind of unsettling substance smeared across his face, he could
only sing while sneering over his right shoulder, his twitching and
jerking about landed him off the stage twice, his singing was mostly
garbled yelling and atonal grunts, and he did it all while wearing a
Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Sex Pistols t-shirt. How
punk. At their best, they might hope to be considered a Fall
knock-off. At their worst, they're a mess of punk clichés that could
gladly be left back in 1977.
Second in line was
Lower, a Copenhagen band that seems to reside somewhere in the realm
of post-punk. I couldn't figure them out, although if I had known at
the time that they were Danish, maybe I wouldn't have thought so hard
about their appearance. The lead singer could have been a frat boy in
America but instead was a harmless crooner. A couple songs got into a
good groove with the bass and drums locked together under some
appealingly angular guitarwork, but most of the songs just dragged.
Merchandise eased into
their set with the opening duo from their new album, After the
End. Carson Cox started into
"Corridor" with wide, vast acoustic guitar sweeps, while
Chris Horn played a synth part and Elsner Niño offered a sparse
percussion arrangement. This led seamlessly into "Enemy",
which already provided a taste of the big sound that the band is
aiming for. Cox's strumming sped up, Niño laid down a bouncy beat,
David Vassalotti
offered a catchy
lead guitar hook,
and Patrick Brady's bass kept it all
moving. In
the bridge, the guitarists went wild and the whole thing sounded like
a rave-up.
This is a band that
hardly makes sense. Emerging from a punk scene, they initially
gravitated to noise and industrial music. In the midst of a constant
stream of output, they suddenly signed onto 4AD and released
something of a pop album. It sounds huge, it has melodic guitar hooks
all over the place, the lyrics are actually printed on the insert,
and somehow it actually sounds like a natural step forward.
It must be some kind of
miracle that when I heard the cheesy electronic tom-tom roll that
introduces "Green Lady", it immediately felt like the best
moments of their industrial-jam back-catalog, I eagerly anticipated
the big guitar hook that was about to start, and the combination
thereof made me want to dance in a way that rock music almost never
does. Why I do I love that retro drum sound? It should be
incongruous, but instead it just makes them seem even bigger.
The best words I have
to describe this bands are simple like that: big, vast, wide,
expansive. Their earlier records partially obtained that result
through extended song lengths, often in the area of ten minutes, but
ever since Children of Desire
their production has been aimed at opening up into a wider space than
any average punk or noise band would care to
consider. They now excel at
the art so well that they have been able to hone their songs into
more traditional pop-song length and arrangement without losing their
sense of vision and scope.
Played
live back to back, "In
Nightmare Room" (from Desire)
and "True Monument" (from After the End),
both highlights of their respective albums, sound
like they belong together. You wouldn't guess that from their
recorded studio versions, in which the former is dark, shadowy,
uptempo, and driven by a drum machine, and the former is bright,
melodic, moderately paced, and adorned with vocal harmonies. On
stage, their differences merge and they seem cut from a similar
cloth. "In Nightmare Room" brightened up with a live
drummer, and "True Monument" picked up an extra edge.
If
there's a misstep on the new album, it's "Telephone", which
sticks out awkwardly in the middle of the album. The poppy beat is
garishly over the top, the titular sound effects are crassly cheesy
(and they already successfully used a telephone sound at the end of
"Satellite"!), and the lyrics are awful and clichéd. Just
like on the album, it stuck out during the show and brought it down a
notch. The song fared better live, where it shed the telephone
ringing
and gained more energetic guitar work, but it was still the low point
of the set.
The
other problem that also translated directly from studio to stage was
the inescapable feeling that the audience is being had. How could a
band like this make something so akin to pop? It isn't a complaint in
itself, but it is hard to feel like there isn't some joke or ironic
gesture. Something feels just a little forced. It's so hard not
to like the catchiness of the new songs, but I wonder if I'm supposed
to reject it. Is it some kind of statement to prove that audiences
are foolish enough to accept anything with the right mix of pop
magic? Or is it a statement that punks, hardcore types, and anyone
too obsessed with "authenticity" are ridiculous to think
that a band like Merchandise could "sell out" by presumably
aiming for mass appeal?
The
only other distracting issue was the mix. Horn's keyboard parts were
almost indiscernible, and Cox's vocals were also a little low. The
drums and guitars sounded great, but the upper registers felt
underrepresented. (Also, where was Horn's sax?) This is one case
where seeing them on a big stage at something like Fun Fun Fun Fest
was clearly preferable. With their sound as big as it is, a smaller
venue like Red 7 makes the music almost claustrophobic. At the
festival, they sounded huge.
The
massiveness of their sound
made an instant impression on me. At Red 7, they sounded restricted
and restrained. I think they would have torn the walls down if they
could.
Scores:
Institute: D-
Lower: B-
Merchandise: B+
Bonus scores:
Bonus scores:
Children of Desire:
A
Totale Nite: B+
"Begging for Your
Life / In the City Light": A-
After the End: B
After the End: B
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