I’m still not entirely sure what happened Sunday night. I know that
Dark Meat made it to the Comet after apparently getting snowed
in at Denver, then driving 30 straight hours in their bus. I know that
they all managed to fit inside the Comet along with the sizable crowd.
I know there were more than a dozen but less than 20 people
representing the band—two drummers, several horn players,
guitarists, a violinist, an organist, a backup vocalist, the guy mostly
responsible for spraying confetti with a leaf blower and
occasionally summoning pitchy squeals from an optical theremin. I know
they do in fact sometimes lose a person; before they started their set,
their singer, Jim McHugh, called out into the crowd, “Molly? Molly?
We lost a member.” I know the Comet’s sound guy was perhaps in a
little over his head—McHugh again: “More flute in the monitors!
When was the last time you heard that, motherfucker?”—though he
kept up admirably. I know that nothing gives your hippie-psych-rock
ensemble (whose horn rave-ups veer dangerously toward ska) some much
needed punk cred like a saxophonist wearing a Locust T-shirt. I know
that the crowd was the most lively I’ve seen at a small bar show in a
long while—dancing, slamming into each other, crowd
surfing. I haven’t had my feet inadvertently stomped on by fellow
revelers that much since I was a teenager, and it felt good. Toward the
end of the set, the line between band and audience blurred out of
existence—McHugh handed off his guitar to some random guy in the front row, who gamely played some one-note riffs while the
singer crowd surfed; band members danced through the audience with
drums; and the violinist repeatedly lunged into the crowd backward,
still shredding strings. You started to suspect that some of the more
involved audience members may have been Dark Meat plants the whole
time. It was not, as people too often describe reckless concerts,
controlled chaos; it was just plain chaos, and it was glorious.
(They’ve been touring with Israeli pyro-trash-punks Monotonix, so it
only makes sense that they’d have their live game stepped up to
match.)
What I don’t know is if I’d ever really want to listen to Dark
Meat’s debut album, Universal Indians, on my home stereo system,
apart from all the festive freedom-ritual ruckus. It’s not a bad
record—its mix of psyched-out, train-wrecking rock ‘n’ roll,
woozy brass-band excess, primal rhythmic pulse, and deranged howling is
plenty powerful—but it just feels kind of flat without all the
sweat and confetti. 