Live review: These are Powers at Death by Audio [11.24.07]

These Are Powers played Saturday night to a hot, packed Death by Audio crowd. Everyone was asked to move away from the wall to leave a corridor for people passing through to the back, it was a good sign.

These Are Powers had spread out from the makeshift stage onto the floor in front of the audience during their sound check and somewhere the noise that was the first song started. Bill Salas had an extensive kit of drums, electronics, and suitcases which spread out to the side and in front of him taking up most of the tiny stage. He stood, working rhythms across the expanse of triggers and actual instruments, building up progressively louder, unintuitive beats.

There are bands that can create sounds that really makes you scratch your head as a musician...I know the sound of most pedals, and I know what a guitar sounds like...so what the hell is going on stage there. I know ex-Liar Pat Noecker was playing bass guitar but I can't say I heard a bass guitar in any recognizable traditional sense. I think that's part of the accomplishment here. They're playing around with traditional semi-tribal elements, the structure, the biological beat. But it goes ever further and is like some kind of world music nightmare, filtered through an industrial sound. Whereas The Liars, Drums Not Dead album works in repetitive hypnotic way to lull the listener, These are Powers are mystifyingly tapping into some sort of primitive futurism to pull you in, this is an ancient un-ignorable magic.

I don't think I've ever really witnessed a crowd literally driven into a frenzy by the band, this was such an audio rhythm assault, and they forced the crowd along for the ride. These Are Powers were so hypnotically infectious, that little by little they persuaded the crowd to move. Every song seemed to just increase this spontaneous energy, except when given the task to clap along, which proved either too complicated to keep up for 4 minutes or, like myself, just too amazed to make a sound and break the spell.



They ended the night with 'Little Sisters of Beijing', all tribal drumming with electronic kettle drum bangs thrown in for good measure. Anna Barie infectiously chants, hoots and parts the audience running through, throwing her head and arms around anyone that will join her...out as far as the microphone cord could reach, the whole time woo woo woo-ing, it's as uncomfortably as close to a drum circle as I want to get. Could These are Powers actually make that a meaningful experience?

I'm convinced.

[Photos courtesy Pete, Feast of Music blog]