Bailter Space, Dot Dash
DC9, Washington DC, April 27, 2023
Of the classic New Zealand bands of the 1980s,
Bailter Space was one to which I never had any affinity or frankly much knowledge. They disdained the sweet melodies of the Chills and the chiming sing-song rock of the Verlaines or 3Ds. Bailter Space is known for blasts of noise and drone, and that’s not my usual thing. But I figure, at this stage well into the 21st century, classic Flying Nun bands are like Pokémon; on the infrequent occasions that they tour, you’ve gotta catch ‘em all.
The show was listed as 8:00, with local power-pop/punk stalwarts
Dot Dash scheduled to open. I like DC9 a lot as a club, but I hadn’t been there since the earliest post-vaccine days and it didn’t occur to me that DC9 meant that Dot Dash would literally start at 8:00 sharp and be wrapping up at 8:45 when I walked into a half-empty club. So, no chance of me to check out their current sound after seeing them a few times over the past decade or so.
Bailter Space (the band now spells their name as one word without a space, but I think they are better known with the original name) grew out of the Flying Nun scene with influential noise-rock outlet the Gordons, but unlike the Dunedin scene of the same era, they were out of Christchurch, and had more in common with abrasive bands like Sonic Youth or German art-noise ensembles of the era.
At maybe its apex of visibility around the mid-90s, with the record
Wammo, Bailter Space songs were like JAMC or with the sneer of Alister Parker’s vocals a bit akin to Suede’s Brett Anderson. It’s like Sugar’s
Beaster EP if many of the hooks were stripped and all that was left was the metallic sheen of abused electric guitars. I like some bands that had that sound; in New Zealand there was the Jean Paul Sartre Experience and of course Scotland had its share of bands of interest, but those all put melody more to the fore.
But in concert it was just all the blare of electric guitars and feedback, without much attempt at melody. It was not the loudest show I’ve attended (that would be Bob Mould solo at the Seventh Street Entry in Minneapolis) but it was enough to be felt through one’s intestines. The undeniable hooks of the shoegaze classic “The Aim” were almost bludgeoned into unrecognizability behind Parker’s howl and the wall of overdubbed guitars. They did one old Gordons song, and other songs whose terse cryptic titles indicate the band’s inscrutability and inapproachability. Bassist John Halvorsen was truly excellent; across the bluster and sheen of the wall of electric guitar distortion, his playing added subtle jazz influences to the noise. Honestly, while the noise could be pummeling, there can also be something soothing about the unrelenting blasts of sound. Parker periodically muttered thanks to the crowd for its modest support but didn’t speak much, but he seemed to be having some problems either with his guitar, or his setlist, because he repeatedly spoke with a tech about either tunings or song selections. They did two from 1993’s heavily Krautrock-influenced
Robot World and two from 2021’s
Concret including “MODF” — “Memory of da Future” — whose lyrics represented one of many of the band’s curtly cynical assessments.
The speak-singing “Machine Song,” a Gordons song, was noteworthy because of the reduced emphasis on overdubbed guitar. It was led by Halvorson’s bass and actually reminds me of Sugar’s “A Good Idea” (which was itself a borrowing of the Pixies and thence previous bands).
And that was it. It was truly one of the
shortest sets I’ve ever seen from a headliner, thanks to @heff for posting to Setlist.fm. (It’s about the length of the brief live record they give away on their Bandcamp.) And bizarrely, they didn’t do
“Splat,” which is their best-known song, a blast of sneer and blur; by this I mean it’s been heard one-quadrillionth as many times as Taylor Swift’s least-known song. But it
is on the free live record.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/29/2023 04:39PM by zwirnm.
