400 Blows
Mon Aug 22
Sabala’s Mt. Tabor
4811 SE Hawthorne
IT’S FITTING that LA’s 400 Blows is named after a film. (Truffaut’s 1959 societal oppression joint, ‘case you were wondering.) Singer Skot Alexander stalks the stage looking like John Belushi looking for drugs at a party. And sometimes, dressed in military leather and gloves, he looks like I’d imagine Brando’s Colonel Kurtz did before he became the death-tripping jungle hippie we know in Apocalypse Now.
It’s this gnashing, dramatic stage presence that helps make 400 Blows such a good live show. The short, squatty dude in aviator shades, stomping the stage like a baby fascist, shouting unintelligible hate speak (the band says the lyrics are love and hope, but I dunno), while the drummer beats a kiddie-size drum kit and the guitarist makes farm animal noises. BLEEAT! RRROWW!
It’s a lean sound too on the band’s new one, Angel’s Trumpets and Devil’s Trombones—A Clockwork Orange reference, natch. The guitar, drums, and singing are sparse and alone and bare and hard. On previous recs, their deal whited itself out (low-rent production, too loud, and too much in too little space), but the new one is full of Alex Newport’s (who turned The Locust into a primordial psyche-grind symphony on their Ipecac EP) tender production caress. The sound is opened up; you hear gaps between skronk—heavenly, ringing silence, before the noise comes back to blast it all to hell.
Opening this show is GSL co-owner Sonny Kay’s Year Future. Sonny’s been in a lot of bands that have inspired a lot of younger bands to make like-noise, and with Year Future he’s rocking the same steez. Par for the course of Sonny’s kinda famous past bands (VSS, Angel Hair, et al.), Year Future is a screaming, scuzzy slap—pure snake venom. Bonus: Now that Moving Units broke up, disco drummer Chris Hathwell is on the YF bus. Expect the pain, but the sweetness too.