By Garrett Schure
I especially enjoyed the Dead Meadow set before their home audience. There was good energy for them. Their stuff is really groove danceable, maybe especially that first number. It’s the one regret of my seaboard tour, not getting my feet off the floor enough for them.
But No Looking Back! This show was fast and fierce right from the start. They came out cooking. The vocals were spat out and clipped and shouted. The guitar playing was jagged and stabbing. The pace was pushed.
Carrie and Corin seemed in real agreement about what the mood was. More hard than angry, maybe a “I’m not going to take shit from anyone” feeling. Or maybe just a recognition this is the last show before a bit of a break, and a desire to go out fast and blazing.
They’ve played a number of different songs third after Fox and Wilderness; a fast and pounding version of Step Aside cemented the mood.
It put an interesting spin on Sympathy: the kick-ass rock ‘n roll component of the song won out over the bluesy soulfulness.
I loved the intro to What’s Mine Is Yours. A slow simple muscular sliding riff, then some repeated ringing noise, then a bit of feedback before launching into the song. I also loved the change of Let’s Call It Love into Entertain. Carrie’s guitar subtly shifted, and Janet’s drums subtly shifted, in a way that was especially cool and smooth this time. When you first recognize Entertain, you realize Hey, it’s been as much Entertain as Let’sCall It Love for quite a few bars now.
At the end of Entertain, and Carrie has been doing this all along, the guitar strap gets flung off just before the last note, and she’s practically walking off the stage guitar in hand: the last thing you hear is a kind of throttled squelched chord she gets out of the hand she’s carrying the thing off with. It’s a
commanding way to end the show.
One More Hour to start the encore. Mother straight into Dig Me Out to end it.
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