Klaxons, Fist Fite @ Chop Suey

I learned something about Fist Fite last night that I probably should’ve figured out long ago. Their “severely amateurish keyboard player/vocalist,” Jonnie Monroe? I know her! We were peripheral acquaintances back in Olympia. She was at at least one of my house parties there! That explains the (partially) my turning up as a character on their myspace page, I guess. It certainly explains her shout out/implied threat at the end of Fist Fite’s set last night: “Is that DJ Eric here? We’ll see you after the show!” (They did see me after the show; we had drinks at Sugar—a club whose decor may have, in fact, inspired the phrase “new rave”—and caught up on old times).

Also, it turns out that Monroe is a fucking mean keyboardist. At their first live show in Seattle (their first live show period), maybe I was drunk (I was), maybe she was drunk, maybe Fist Fite had nerves, but it was a fluke. Monroe is kind of like an evil version of Beth Ditto on stage, screaming and singing into a yellow telephone (pssst—Japanther’s on the other line, they want their mic back) while shredding on a pair of keyboards, or awkwardly dancing and gesturing with a wicked sneer on her face. The band played as a three piece, with distorted bass rounding out their low end, and it they sounded heavy. They alternated between spazzed out synth punk blasts, proggy riffing, and half-time swagger. In those half-time moments, with spooky organs looming, scuzzy bass blowing out amps, and drums stomping around, the band resembled nothing so much as the heavy metal disco of Justice. It was not, as I may have previously though, “bullshit.” Not totally anyway.

As Jonathan pointed out earlier, and as everyone and their shut-in, internet disabled grandma should know by now, The Klaxons are just a rock band, if a pretty good one. There is no new rave, kids. (Seriously, the four kids there last night with the glitter and the bubbles and the pink mesh shirt and the glowsticks break my heart—they’re dressed up for a party, for a scene, that doesn’t exist). Look up on the stage: it’s just some dudes in t shirts and jeans. What’s weird is how impossible it seems to be to address the Klaxons on these terms, as a rock band. Even I fell back on debunking the stupid new rave straw-man in this recent article on the band. It’s fun and easy. But I think it’s time to stop debunking the myth and start ignoring it, so it goes away. Not because I don’t like rave, old or new, mind you, but because that’s just not what the Klaxons are.

Live, the Klaxons lack much of the nuance and depth of their recordings—the synth tones and atmospheres created by Simian Mobile Disco producer James Ford are flattened and fuzzed out into a fairly standard rock sound. And even that sound was a little thin last night—a friend suggested that the thinness was due to the bass player missing a few notes here and there in between drinks. Their drummer played along to a drum track on at least a couple songs, but that didn’t do much augment their sound. The core of the Klaxons sound is their vocals, the odd hooks and harmonies they throw into their singing, and their vocals sounded just fine last night. They’re basically a barbershop quartet…FROM THE FUTURE! And they do have some spectacularly catchy songs, so that’s always going to work for them, even if their live show isn’t yet phenomenal.

And Jonathan was right, they played their entire album, as well as b-side “Dance With Me.” Their set went like this:

The Bouncer
Atlantis to Interzone
Dance With Me
Totem on the Timeline
Golden Skans
As Above So Below
Two Receivers
Magick
Forgotten Worlds
Gravity’s Rainbow
Isle of Her
It’s Not Over Yet
(encore)
Four Horsemen of 2012