March 14, 2005

Concert Review: Menomena, Mercury Lounge, 3/12/05

After the jump, you will find the first in what will hopefully become a series of gonzo concert reviews, in which we don’t just review the concert, we review the entire evening. Click for the story of the Menomena show that Dan and Erica and I went to see on March 12.

Ok, so the evening started for Erica and I at Zen Palate, nearish to 46th Street and 9th Avenue, where I spent entirely too much money for a piece of key lime pie that I wasn't really hungry for. Erica had the yam fries, which she said were good. The pie was good, though. We had our snack while writing a new AWOK sketch, about scabies, but we had eaten our food by the time we'd finished the sketch, and we started getting nonverbal guilt from the waitress because we were taking up a table several minutes after we were done. So Erica broke down and got a piece of pear pie. We got a nice first draft of the sketch, but we don't much appreciate this "You have to buy food to sit at our restaurant" shit. So already, this concert is off to a bad start.

We then head on down to the Mercury Lounge, where this show is, thinking we were going to have to line up at 7 to buy tickets for the 8:00 show, but nay, we meet Libby (You don't know Libby.), and find that there's no line, and that the whole schedule of the show is pushed back an hour. Also, nobody has called Dan like we said we would, because we all assumed someone else would, so boo on us for flaking out, and boo on him for not protesting our discourtesy more angrily. It turned out not to matter because of the delay of the show, and even with the late notice, he got there right on time.

While we wait for him, somebody thinks it's a bright idea to get another bite to eat, and so we head to the knishery nearby. I had never been to a knishery or eaten a knish, so that's how I ended up getting yet another bite that I didn't really want that much. However, it was alright, because knishes are a good, cheap snack, and that's a fact I didn't know before. But let's talk about the knishery for a second.

We ordered the following:
2 coffees
One not-cheese regular type pretzel
One potato knish
one sweet potato knish

And received:
1 coffee
One knish-type pretzel made with cheese
2 potato knishes.

Meaning, the waiter screwed up each of our three orders. He made it right eventually, but still, way to perpetuate the stereotype of Knish purveyors that don't give you the right kinds or amounts of knishes! There have been suicide bombings over stuff more trivial than this...

Erica comes back from the bathroom and I get up to take a turn, and she's all like "I just want to warn you, there's a surprise in there."

I'm like, "No big deal, I'll just pee on it."

Well, she wasn't kidding. Toilet was clogged, and it was full to about half an inch from the top of the bowl. Well, I filled it the rest of the way, closed the lid, and somewhere in the two seconds that it took me to close the toilet, I forgot that it was clogged and full, and absentmindedly flushed the toilet. It was an honest and embarrassing mistake, to be sure. I ran back into the serving area with nary a look behind me, sat down at the table, motioned for everyone to huddle close, drank my coffee in one gulp, and declared, "We have to go now."

And we did, after a lot of nerve-wracking math, because none of us could fucking break a twenty, and we had to come up to the front counter to get change. Meanwhile the clock is ticking, and any second, our surprise could be discovered. The waitress who wasn't serving us was just heading round the corner to where they keep the WC when the waiter finished ringing us up at the counter. It was literally some Mission Impossible shit.

"Happy Birthday," I said to the nice knisher, an we exited the knishery. I hope for his sake that he savored that time between the moment when he thought I was being cryptic, and the moment when the waitress probably rushed back into the serving area in tears to report that I wasn't being cryptic.

So, the Mercury Lounge. Not a bad little club. Drinks are not that reasonable by our dumb Pennsylvania standards, but comparable to what's reasonable for New York. Coat check is $2, so boo.

We pay our cover, and enter somewhere in the middle of the first opener, The Metallic Falcons.

Holy shit, the only way you'd believe the description I'm about to give is if it came from someone who wasn't in a sketch group. But I am, so I'm sorry.

Imagine that there are two hippie girls sitting on the floor indian-style. One who plays notes only occasionally on an electric guitar, and one who switches between harmonium and autoharp. And imagine that they drone on and on forever and play very very very very slowly and kind of mumble in a kind of harmony about 12 words' worth of unintelligible lyrics a minute. It's a horrible sound, unlikely to cause anybody to get pumped up for the bands to come. Ok, imagine that.

You've come close to imagining the Metallic Falcons. What's missing from this mental picture is the amazing three foot-long fake white beards and Indian headdresses they were wearing. So, all things considered, The Metallic Falcons are the greatest rock band ever.

Following them was Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which is some nice Talking Heads-influenced punk music, done by a group whose name I did not like at first, but now I do. Not much else to say, except I like punk, and I love the Talking Heads, and they didn't disappoint.

The last opener was Pit Er Pat, whose name I still do not like. This was a divisive band for the four of us. Libby gave no thumbs up, but for the rest of us, the redeeming qualities of this act were very redemptive. This is a trio of organ, bass and drums. Starting with the drummer: holy damn, one of the greatest displays of drumming I'd ever seen. This guy was just off the charts doing some amazing math-rock stuff that I couldn't even begin to figure out. The play between the organs and drums reminded me much of one of my guilty pleasure records from 2004, the self-titled record by Automato, but more proggy, and with no rapping. Pit Er Pat are just a better band, let's just say that. Or at least you can imagine that they were a better band if the singing wasn't so out of tune. The bassist and keyboard player each got lots of turns to lead songs, and both were way off pitch as often as not. It was just a shame, because on a good day, they were good. The drummer was the best singer of all of them; he must have a very powerful brain to sing the way he does while he plays the things he can play. Also, they were loud. Real loud. I crumpled up some ATM receipts and put them in my ears. Concertgoers take heed, if you're at a show where the volume is painful, a little bit of whatever crumpled up paper is in your pocket goes a long way. No need for real earplugs.

Finally, menomena. Menomena play a strange kind of techno. They allow their music to be composed by a computer program they developed for themselves, and add their own lyrics to that, and then they learn to play live what the computer composed for them. It should be boring, but it's not. Anyway, they were really fantastic. I theorize that people like me who have memorized every note from their album I Am The Fun Blame Monster! would enjoy this more than people who haven't. If you've listened to this record as much as me, you can go to this show and know what's coming, (how many measures of bass before the sax comes in, how many repetitions of the xylophone solo, etc.), but the appealing mystery is waiting to see how these three goofy nerds recreate it live. And they did it. They recreated very well songs that you might not have thought were possible for just three guys to play. Great show, you guys. Yes. You did a yeoman's job.

So, in conclusion, I recommend you avoid Menomena concerts like the plague, because if you go to one, you're guaranteed to end up paying too much for pie and flooding the bathroom of a knishery, and forgetting to call Dan, and Libby probably won't like the third band, and it'll be a week before you remember to take the ATM receipts out of your ears. Sorry, Menomena, you should have thought about that before you went on tour. Menomena gets 4 out of 10 thumbs up.

Posted by Nate Kushner at 02:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack