WireTapMusic (beta) - Your online resource for San Francisco music - Wiretap Music Presents Black Fiction, 60 Watt Kid, Chairman Wow @ Thee Parkside 02/20/08

Wiretap Music Presents Black Fiction, 60 Watt Kid, Chairman Wow @ Thee Parkside 02/20/08

Wednesday, March 05 2008

Wiretap Music Presents
BLACK FICTION
60 WATT KID
CHAIRMAN WOW
Thee Parkside
Feb. 20, 2008

We were glad to donate the proceeds from the evening to Rudy Beredo, a fellow local music critic who needs all of our well-wishes and all of our support. Good luck Rudy! We’re rooting for you !

Chairman Wow

Chairman Wow opened the show with a quiet but impassioned set of choral folk. Joining the chairmen – Tom and Matthew – onstage were three lovely ladies who added a whole heaping of harmony to the duo’s otherwise spare but catchy folk tunes.

When 60 Watt Kid took the stage, the evening abruptly changed – gone utterly were the hushed tones. 60 Watt Kid consists of a floor tom and a whole bunch of noise. I mean, there are guitars and samples and keyboards and lots of effects in there, and plenty of delay-drenched vocals – but they’re mostly all used as layers of ambient noise on top of very basic but moving beats.

To call 60 Watt Kid “experimental” music I think would miss the point, though. It’s not experimental so much as it is just simple in a minimal noise rock kind of way. Except that it’s not minimal music by any means. There’s nothing simple or even easy about the music – it can be quite demanding of the listener, such as the interlude in “Every Day” when vocalist Kevin Litrow isn’t singing at all but “talking” on the phone with a friend and hanging up on them to take another call, over and over again through lots of delay and reverb.

60 Watt Kid

No, when I say simple I mean they’ve stripped their music down to its essential elements. They’re not trying to impress you with their stage moves or the uber-catchy arrangement of their tunes. They’re just trying to make noise. Interesting noise, noise that gets in your head and worms around, noise that haunts you inexplicably, all underpinned by uncomplicated but more than sufficient beats.

It’s a good thing Black Fiction played last, because these guys are just an unstoppable juggernaut of psychedelic rock. They also went without a traditional drummer, but they two-upped 60 Watt Kid with not two but three floor toms and three percussionists (including guest percussionist Warren, of Tussle and Citay fame) to play them and a whole host of various other percussive instruments.

You can hear a touch of classic flower power psychedelia in Black Fiction’s vocal melodies, and there are some pretty clear bluesy influences on the guitar lines. These are the obvious touchstones of Black Fiction’s music. What’s not so obvious is how they manage to start from such a standard premise and turn it into the display of psych might the band’s live show entails.

Black Fiction rocks

You can hear strains of the best early psychedelic bands from the 60s in Black Fiction’s music, as well as some more garage rock or proto-punk type influences, especially from the bass and guitar. The vocals are typically the type of melodies you’d expect in a sunnier pop band. But there’s never that easy-on-the-ears saccharine quality of true pop. There’s a pop element, for sure, but Black Fiction throws in the three percussionists, one of whom shouts occasionally into a pair of earphones, and a variety of keyboards, and this bizarre rhythm section brings an edge to the music that belies all descriptors you might pin on the band.

There are Black Fiction’s obvious influences, and then there’s the not so subtle hint of hip hop in some of the beats, the extended jams and the experimental noise rock element, often all on display at the same time. That they manage to hover well above chaos is a feat in and of itself. That the music is actually deep and complex and listenable all at the same time is how you know this music comes from a transcendent plane altogether apart from our own.

[Mike G.]

Check out our Facebook group for more pics!

[WATCH] Wiretap Live Cam 02/20/08

[STREAM] Wiretap Presents Podcast o2/20/08 featuring Black Fiction, 60 Watt Kid, Chairman Wow

[STREAM] Black Fiction: "I Spread the Disease" , "Magic Hands"

[STREAM] 60 Watt Kid: "Every Day"

[STREAM] Chairman Wow: "The next three words I say"

[ Back ]