In 1968, Jane Fonda starred in a sci-fi film about the 41st century where she depicted a sexy astronaut lady named Barbarella whose means of having sex originally involved popping a pill and holding her hand a tantalizing two inches away from a gentleman’s hand to mysteriously achieve orgasm. This, according to Barbarella, is future sex. The Dangerous Boys Club have ideas about future sex, too, and even a song about it (assuming they’re referring to sex as it relates to “doing it,” not sex as it relates to gender stereotypes). Eventually, both sexed-up starlets will have to learn something about sex and concerts–if it’s good, don’t change it, and if you’re obsessed with the future, at least be subtle about it. Having the senses confused and expectations scrambled is interesting enough to be worth the cost of admission, but this kind of entertainment-trickery is not for everybody; that said, neither is the Dangerous Boys Club (or sex-drenched vintage sci-fi films). So I’ll do my best to relate the experience of what this means for their live performance.
The DBC greeted the small crowd on Thursday with smoke machines pumping everyone’s lungs with excessive amounts of perfumed water vapor while green laser beams and blinding backlights blasted from the wall behind the stage, outlining a black silhouette of the lead singer Aaron Montaigne as he pulsated and wailed like a young, futuristic reincarnate of David Bowie and Dave Gahan. Synthesized chirps and brooding organs clotted the sound waves like bacon grease being sucked through a stir straw. Things just felt off balance and difficult to latch on to. However, in their defense, it’s a neat concept to conceal oneself in darkness and blind the audience with lights as a sort of audience-performer role reversal, or an implied “this is what it’s like to be on stage” message. Artists should screw with convention at the risk of losing people; it just sucks when you’re the one who gets lost.
Maybe I would have felt more of an affinity with the DBC had they, say, put a ring of blinky rainbow lights around their kick-drum, jettisoned the high-beams, and recruited a spindly-legged lady to sing and dance and flail around in front of a laser like the band that played after them Reporter (former Wet Confetti). If I were to be propelled into space in escape of an imminent apocalypse, I’d make sure to grab my cat, some motion sickness pills, and Reporter’s new album, Time Incredible, demanding it stay on rotation in my rocket ship so kitty and I could forever recreate the mini rock-out rave party Reporter instigated that night at the Holocene. The set was short but energetic with lots of dancing, of course, between the intermittent smoke-machine blasts wrapped in green laser light that caused some mild disorientation. But such is to be expected from an impromptu trip to space, and I was happy to have Reporter piloting that ship.