madmadammim and lincoln3 today, one after the other. Adam and I discovered that Gabriel Brothers is not actually perhaps the place you want to buy lots of T-shirts to print things on and mail to your friends. The merchandise seemed mostly either second-hand or the "factory mishap" kind.Went to this Rasputina concert in Morgantown, WV, thanks to
escargonaut for providing transportation. It was quite awesome. The opening band was even pretty good. They did (all three of them) have a habit of making funny faces constantly, mostly of the AUURGHHH I AM ZE INTENSELY GRIMACING ARTISTE variety, like they were an SNL parody of themselves. One guy even kinda looked like Will Ferrell, or however you spell his name. However they were pretty damn skilled with their instruments and they kept switching around instruments at that, which was impressive. The music was sometimes ponderous and merely ambient, which I usually hate, but at plenty of other moments it was rockin' fast cello-electric guitar-drum goodness. The thing about the drummer, well --- I have this advice to offer him, though I frankly doubt he's reading. But, I say to you, esteemed Sir Mr. Tarantula AD drummer: if you choose, as you do, to wear a cloth headband, as if to suggest that you perhaps like habitually ride an extraordinarily virile model of motorcycle on a day-to-day basis or something, and furthermore if you play the standard drum kit very loud and fast, then I think you will be taken plenty seriously as a rock drummer. Under these conditions you are well within your bounds in the role of rock drummer to intensely grimace now and then, laboring as you are under the burden of so much rocking.However. If your songwriting muse calls for, and will not be denied the inclusion of a medium gourd shaken so as to produce a not at all particularly rocking shikka-shikka sort of sound, or perhaps some jingly-jangly jingle bells, then please, please reconsider the "I am so bad-ass, my ass shall abide no goodness in its immediate vicinity" headband, or at the very least the intense "oh my fuck this rocks so hard" rockstar grimace for the duration of the gourd-shaking segment of the song.
Also since I found myself just looking around at the crowd during this band's performance, I thought I'd make the remark that Morgantown's goth scene is not very large numerically (I think this concert probably drew the entire population of it, in addition to a bunch of more normally dressed folks) but they are pretty large personally. I'm saying, on an individual basis, their size is not to be trifled with.
Now, Rasputina themselves, they were just fucking great. I had never really heard their music before, but thought for some reason that taking a two-hour car ride to another state to hear some "cello rock" seemed like a good idea. Was it ever! Not only did they have some really sweet harmonization between the two cellos, near the end of their set there were some very nice multivocal stuff as well. Melora's singing by itself was powerful and had a lot of stylistic range, but Zoe's backup additions left me wanting more; she only really sung by herself a little bit on the encore song, and it was really cool.