where we'll join our heroine in her travails in search of kick ass music and more

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

The Enemy @ Bowery Ballroom - 8.11.08

I think the overall theme for this intimate show at the Bowery was pressure.

Pressure from me towards my friend (sort of bullied him into coming along), pressure from being pushed up against by the lively (and often thoroughly thrashed) crowd, pressure from the band to go out there and do something about the state our world is in – lousy economy, etc – and well, they also played their song ‘Pressure’ :o)

My bullied friend (thanks again D.!) and I managed to make our way to the Bowery not only on time, but (gasp! shudder!) actually a bit early. There were meant to be 2 opening bands, but D. noticed that there was some sort of notice on the poster out front, saying they wouldn’t be performing. Er, I can be less than observant at times. So we were treated to just the one opener…which was plenty enough really. The Photo Atlas was their name and quite a loud group of young’uns they were. First couple of songs were…well, boring. Derivative of every other loud punk-like young band out there at the moment – reminded me a bit of the likes of those Blink-182 side projects – Angels something or other. But about three songs in, they started to actually play pretty decent songs. Not much stage presence as D. pointed out, but they could play and some of the songs had me bouncing and even singing along…or rather, given my notorious inability to understand lyrics most of the time, hum along. There was one particular song towards the end of their set that I thought showed the tiniest Townsend-ish sound, which is never really a bad thing :o) As for the guys themselves, like I said earlier, not much stage presence. I don’t think any of them, besides the lead singer, even ever looked at the crowd. The drummer in particular, seemed to be infatuated with/hypnotized by one of his cymbals…or so it seemed at various points in the evening. Oh, and I must point out that he had the most unfortunate resemblance to Sonic the Hedgehog. Really. Hair was just a bit mad. But regardless of their ‘interesting’ looks, they did ‘bring it’ by the end of their set.


Sonic the hedgehog impersonator, alas, hidden from view in this group shot of The Photo Atlas.

And then there was a brief interlude, during which some of the most boisterous members of the audience went photo crazy. They had started during the opener’s set, taking pics of each other dancing goofily and then progressed to those group photos from arm’s length that everyone has at least one of in their collection. But then they just got more and more aggressive about the pics, seemingly needing almost the whole damn middle of the floor in order to set up them up. At which point bullied friend and I moved closer to the stage and away from the shenanigans. But they did make me smile a few minutes later. When they basically invited everyone on the floor to a group photo! I thought I was a bit jaded about shows, but I’d never seen that :o)

But on to the main event, the young lads from England. I was introduced to them by my boy and was hooked from the first riff. The music is loud, it’s hard and it’s actually got a conscience. It deals with youth dissatisfaction and the crappy economy that seems to be prevalent everywhere these days. They’ve got a bit of the Clash going on, as far as their class awareness which I just dug a lot. They did a blistering set – about 45 minutes or so. No stops, no breaks of any kind, no encores. I liked that. I’m sure it was mostly a ‘gee,-we’re-just-starting-out-and-don’t-have-that-much-material’ thing, but it worked. Left all of us wanting more even after the houselights came on.


Crowd starting to get excited about fighting for injustice - see the raised fist? ;o)

The boys have a good stage presence and took the time to speak to the crowd about what the songs were about…even if the accent was a bit hard to understand at times (oh, to have my british boy around to translate…) At one point, the lead singer mentioned how this was their last show of the US tour and how they’d been a bit worried before coming over, about whether the American crowds would get what they were about. But then he realized that our economy was in shambles as well, so we had no problems relating ;o)


Note the football club scarf draped over the speaker - not sure which team though.


Twelve-year-old drummer partially hidden by, well, by his drum kit.

They also introduced a new song, which as per usual, I didn’t get the name of. The singer mentioned how he’d seen the Sex Pistols at the Isle of Wight recently and how he’d gotten angry at some local promoter bloke (or possibly concert security, not sure) who’d stopped people from dancing. And how angry that made him, b/c ‘that geezer’ had missed what punk was all about. And how ‘dancing had never hurt anyone’. Well, I might have to argue with him on that last bit. I mean, I’ve certainly been present at many a show where ‘dancing’, aka moshing, got out of hand, and people did indeed get hurt. But I understood his sentiment. I’ve also been to shows where at the first sign of movement from the crowd, security steps up to break it up, which is just ridiculous. I think a nice compromise is usually reached, and for the most part that’s what we had yesterday. A bit of pushing, but nothing too crazy…although my friend might argue that with me.

After the singer finished his shpiel about dancing, all hell broke loose…or it could have, if it’d been more packed.

Cups of beer started to be thrown on stage (which D. was just horrified by), but after the Enemy’s oral manifesto on punk, it was to be expected – crowds aren’t known for their subtlety. You tell them they should dance and get ‘crazy’, well, they’re going to take it too far and not appreciate that it shouldn’t include throwing things at people.

But for the most part, the crowd did behave, with lots of energy and singing along…or maybe the singing was just me being extra loud ;o) I do tend to thoroughly enjoy myself at smaller shows like this. ‘Aggro’ was particularly rousing and ‘Technodanceaphobic’ was really, really good – as you can see from the teeny bit of video below.



Teeny video of my personal favorite 'Technodanceaphobic'

So, wrap-up of show? Great, great show. Hopefully the Enemy will be able to keep up their indignant anger towards injustice while not repeating themselves in their upcoming album. I for one, very much look forward to seeing what they’ll do next.