I went and saw Donna Summer last night at the WFMU benefit (although I didn't make it through Matmos--People Like Us gave me such a headache) and there are a few things I need to correct from what I said earlier.

1) He does indeed bring the rock. The crowd was being unresponsive (which is kind of not surprising seeing as how, as one merch-table staffer put it, they "look like the crowd at our record shows") and so he charged out there to try and energize us and ended up tackling this one guy and breaking a table. Which probably hurt that guy, but still, it was pretty awesome. After that, I was engaged.

2) He does sustain quite a dancable groove, even if none of the geeks in the audience (besides two or three who were at the Sloth-in-Goonies end of the nerd appearance scale) were actually dancing, especially after he tackled a random bystander. (Which would seem to make you more likely to dance--"We'll shimmy, just don't hurt us, radio DJ!"--but there you go.) Despite the breaks, each song definitely sustains a steady BPM groove throughout, after it gets up to speed. I'd kinda like to be at one of his european shows.

2a) ...oh, except for the prog song, which had no groove whatsoever and kind of killed the mood.

2b) ...also, the gabba song was good, even if too short (i.e. 9 seconds).

Incidentally, why the hell were all the FMUers wearing eyepatches? Was it some sort of elaborate Momus joke? (Confusing Matmos with Momus?)

...ah, I see from reading my goddamn mail that the benefit was for a guy with an eye injury, so it was sort of a solidarity thing. Still.

The guy before Donna was...well...uh, well, we saw him in the bar before and he's kinda fat and wearing this tucked-in Flintstones t-shirt and was balding and had strips shaved into his head and he had these huge, square glasses, and we were like, wow, that guy's taking indie-retard fashion about as far as it can go. Then he turned out to be the opening act and it involved a lot of spastic shouting, promting Jesse to coin a new genre: 'tardcore.

What is 'tardcore? Well, I guess you'll know it when you see it. But it's sort of like joycore that isn't good but is really trying hard and you want to pat it on the head.

I'm sure the man himself was nice enough (he seemed to have a lot of friends) and the music was OK, but good lord. Hardcore 'tardcore.
posted by Mike B. at 12:43 PM 0 comments