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Friday, November 1, 2013
Music / Live Reviews Live review: Cults, Visulite Theatre (10/31/2013)
Posted By Pat Moran on Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 3:20 PM
Cults
Visulite Theatre
Oct. 31, 2013
Despite having his face covered by a blood clotted surgical mask, Cult's Brian Oblivion was ebullient: "We are fucking over the moon to be here on Halloween!" Noting that All Hallows' Eve was the band's favorite holiday, Oblivion added, "We wrote these songs to be spooky."
Spooky songs to fit a (mostly) spooky crowd. Sure, some hottie vamp chicks snaked through the Visulite audience, but I spied few of those dire "sexy" fill-in-the-blank costumes that miss the kids-playing-dress-up appeal of our darkest and craziest holiday. A ninja, the Childrens Hospital clown, a guy in a goofy tiger suit and other Groovie Ghoulies kept Halloween's creepy kiddie spirit alive. The band, expanded to a five piece, played along, coming out onto the cobwebbed stage as mad doctors in homemade ghostly face paint and blood spattered lab coats.
Cults' costumes proved fitting for a set which was polished yet loose limbed, equal parts sweetly naive and sinister. A typical Cults number evokes the hazy afterglow of a groovy spaghetti-spy-Euro horror era that never was. Madeline Follin's '60s girl group-by-way-of-crazy-ex vocals punch through a velvet feedback fog like Lesley Gore crawling out of a white noise TV in The Ring, all twisted and tangled hair, to scare us to death.
At first, Follin was overpowered by the five piece band's claustrophobic Jesus and Mary Chain squall, and overshadowed by video monitors playing clips from Psycho and The Shining which emerged from static filled screens like faces glimpsed in a campfire. By the time the band launched into the spectral surf and glockenspiel of "Always Forever," Follin's honeyed, unnerving vocals were pumped higher in the mix, and the artsy/retro video display seemed more organic to the evening's musical flow.
In pale pancake, black circled eyes and greasepaint smeared blood, Follin was crazy-sexy-cool, whether swaying brassily like an undead Amy Winehouse on the David Lynch doo-wop cabaret of "You Know What I Mean" or smiling with girlish glee at the close of the haunting '70s prog inflected "So Far."
Though the evening was dominated by the band's cinematic bombast, sci-fi Theremin and shoegaze squall, the set's stand-out moment was one of relative silence. As the rollicking monster mash "Bumpers" drew to a call-and-response, start/stop close, the band dropped out for several minutes. The crowd went wild as a beatific grin spread across Follin's face in a look of pure joy.
Live, Cults are moodier and noisier than on record, and Follin's gorgeous voice shades duskier. Yet the band never strays far from its template. Their songs marry wistful sing-along melodies to dark lyrics, the vintage goth psychedlia of Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra and a fuzzy ball of reverb and decay.
Instead of being confined by their model, Follin and Oblivion thrive in their chosen petri dish. As the fuzz bass stomper "I Can Hardly Make You Mine," the holy organ and feedback duel "Keep Your Head Up" and the transcendent encore "Go Outside" proved, the method to the duo's madness produces magnificent songs.
At the Visulite, Cults played the perfect show for Halloween, the ancient feast of Samhain, when folklore says the veil between the worlds is transparent, and we're most likely to see beyond our reality to whatever the hell lies beyond. Cults' may not have pierced that veil, but their compelling nuggets of sugary unease were uplifting and uneasy, forever balanced on glamorous uncertainty.
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