Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Live: Ty Segall/Ex-Cult @ The Mohawk 1/25/13



The Ty Segall/Ex-Cult show I saw should have been the Ty Segall/Ex-Cult/OBN III’s show that I saw, but travel problems caused me to arrive to the Mohawk literally the moment the OBN III’s finished playing. Which sucks, both in terms of missing a great band but everyone saying how excellent they were that night. Thankfully, the two bands that I did manage to see that night more than satisfied the garage-punk craving that had been building inside me for far too long.

Ex-Cult



Ex-Cult were an interesting bunch. They gave off the air of a bunch of drunk hooligans, five kids who just wanted to play their untamed rock songs on stage, without caring how it came out on the other end. The thing was despite a degree of sloppiness during the set (and it was there), Ex-Cult are actually a really tight outfit. All three guitars, the twin guitar roar and throbbing bass through out the set, brought forth the post-punk tension that lays within Ex-Cult's songs, held steady by the drummers frantic but constant pounding. Lead singer Chris Shaw had an magnetism to him, yelping his lines and twisting his body on stage, akin to a slightly more crazy Brendan Suppression. It was a deeply entertaining set that definitely helped to set the stage to what Ty Segall and co. were soon to deliver, hindered only slightly by the poor mix that was coming out of the soundboard.

Ty Segall



Midway through Ty Segall's set, I think I realized only half the crowd at goes to see Ty Segall to actually watch him and his cohorts create music onstage. The others use the show as a sort of  soundtrack for their release, the unleashing of tucked in excitement, aggression, and energy that they save just for Ty Segall shows. At few other times, including the hardcore punk shows I've attended, has the been so much madness, a flurry of people jumping off stage and everyone trying to mosh at once. There is a collective euphoria to this, with the smiles across people's faces during the whole show, as violent as it was. All this isn't to dismiss Ty Segall's performance at all though. He was on fire as usual, there's no other way to put it. His ability ot just step on stage, barely say a word during the entire set, and barrel through garage scorcher to Black Sabbath sludge-garage worship to manic blast of garage-punk fury is close to memorizing if you weren't being thrown around by the crowd. It was an honest to God rock show in the truest form, one that no one stood still for and left you with you're ears ringing, if they hadn't been blown out instead.

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