At The Drive-In, Murder City Devils & Eastern Youth

Seeing Papa Roach frontman Coby Dick and guitarist Jerry Horton in the crowd at the last Sunday's At The Drive In, Murder City Devils and Eastern Youth show at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall (the second show of a two-night engagement) offered kind of a sobering realization: When bands like Papa Roach - who not only play music that isn't anywhere near indie or revival rock, but who are also so busy that it's impressive that they even have time to check out new bands for themselves - when a band like that shows up at an indie cred-fest like last Sunday's show, you know there's a growing mainstream buzz around the evening's performers.

But Dick and Horton have good reason to be interested in At The Drive In, and to a lesser extent, The Murder City Devils. Both of these bands are on track (or so it may seem) to knock the kind of rock the P-Roach guys make off the block. At the Drive In has been garnering huge acclaim in the media, great radio play at really big alternative rock stations, monstrous play on MTV2 and decent play on MTV. They're the focal point of one of the fastest growing fan bases in rock right now for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that they're a kick-ass band, and their sound is unequivocally rock 'n' roll, but new, fresh and interesting - an increasingly difficult combination in today's rock realm. The Murder City Devils represent a rapidly-growing ground swell of revival rock that can also be seen in such acts as The Catheters, The (International) Noise Conspiracy, Tight Bros. From Way Back When, Sunshine and many more - a backlash of sorts against the alterna-core rap-metal movement infesting (no pun intended) the airwaves and rock charts these days.

But with the quickly rising popularity of ATDI, it's no surprise that Dick and Horton weren't the only representatives of the huge corporate rock culture, who blended with the already varied mix of patrons. Fans in OzzFest and Summer Sanitarium Tour T-shirts abound, lost in a sea of many greasy, tattooed punk rockers, horn-rimmed indie kids and people best classified simply as music fans.

The SF / Chico crew I arrived with (one of many contingents of that same construct) walked through the doors to find Japan's Eastern Youth on stage. I've been listening off and on to the trio's latest release, Kumo Ineke Koe (which translates as May My Scream Reach The Clouds), a swirling collection of pop songs that slightly recall Weezer, but are obviously motivated from a different place. I find some of the record really attractive, though it's not necessarily my favorite, but in the live setting this band takes on a beastly power that transforms their music into something slightly different. Bouncy pop guitar lines become big crunchy pieces of muddy, heart-felt riffage and cutely off-key croons grow to powerful roars. In other words, live, Eastern Youth play the kind of pop music that I like: really dirty-sounding pretty songs with strong vocals and snappy construction bolstered by a low, rumbling conviction. The best single moment of Eastern Youth's set came towards the end. Throughout their time on stage, the group's vocalist and guitar player, Hisashi Yoshino, had been speaking in Japanese to the crowd, who collectively responded with silence and blank stares. Towards the end of the set, in the middle of speaking to the apathetic audience, Yoshino, stopped talking, tilted his head, cracked a little smile said very slowly, "Sank you. Sank you bery, bery mush." The crowd loved it and broke from nearly absolute silence to a surge of screaming appreciation.

After some milling around watching The Murder City Devils set up their gear, the Seattle quintet kicked off a strong drunken set of material mostly from their last two records, Empty Bottles, Broken Hearts and In Name and Blood. The group, whose live shows often feel like punk rock revival meetings, can really throw their heart and soul into a performance, and even on a night like this - they were a little drunk, and therefore slightly sloppy; frontman Spencer Moody's seemed to be yelling rather than delivering with his regularly melodic screaming; and I've still never seen them play my two favorite songs on In Name and Blood, "Rum To Whiskey" and "Lemuria Rising," god dammit - The Murder City Devils threw down a memorable, fun set. Farfisa organ player Leslie Hardy was joined on stage by one adoring female fan during "Boom Swagger Boom," a tune off the Devils' eponymous debut LP, and was kept in very close company throughout the song's duration; Moody spent the evening trying out his mic stand tricks and taunting the crowd; guitarist Dann Gallucci hammed it up for the ladies in the front, full-on rock star style; and, of course, at the end of the set, drummer Coady Willis lit his drum kit on fire - nuthin' but great stuff in a Devils' stage show.

The band most of the crowd was there to see took hardly any time in setting up, and as At The Drive In launched into their set, the chaotically ambient opening tones of "Arcarsenal," the opening cut on ATDI's latest release, Relationship of Command (Grand Royal), filled the room. By the time the song was up to speed and frontman Cedric Bixler was screaming the first line, "I must have read a thousand faces / I must have robbed them of their cause," the band, as well as the crowd, was in full swing. The song was one of the more rockin' tunes on the set list that night, the band opting to explore some more feedback-laden territory, which sounded cool, but would have worked out better had the PA system not been feeding back. Throughout the set, guitarist Jim Ward split his duties between his guitar and a keyboard setup, and more than once, the band dropped into trance-inducing song sections, Bixler playing with a vocal effects rig, bassist Pall Hinojos the onlymember actually keeping time. Even though the set contained plenty of up-tempo numbers, overall, it was a bit more subdued than I remember from past shows.

The reason for this mellower set, explained Bixler towards the end of the evening - as did Ward, when he told some young tough guys involved in excessive pit activity to mellow out - was that the night before, a young lady had been punched in the face by some overzealous mosh pit asshole, and as Bixler told the crowd, "We hate to think of our music as something that makes you guys want to beat the shit out of each other. That's not our intention." He wrapped up his between-song soliloquy by telling the people that if they had something to say, "do it with your hips, not with your fists."

The words were taken to heart, without any backtalk from the audience, and the crowd, most of which was unusually subdued to begin with, remained relatively mellow, even those dancing up front. ATDI played a lot of songs off the new record, including their big hit, "One Armed Scissor," plus a few songs from the Vaya EP and their legendary Fearless Records full-length, In / Casino / Out. Throughout the evening, Bixler and guitarist Omar Rodrigués were their typically acrobatic selves, though Rodrigués chilled a bit because when he jumped around too hard, he unplugged his guitar and dropped out of the mix. Bixler went flying off the bass drum several times, thrashing and dancing on stage while his band mates stood strong around him, charging through the set list until the final number. When it was all said and done, the house lights came up, the band quietly thanked the crowd and slunk off stage without an encore. The rock speaks for itself.

- Max Sidman
- Photos by D.C. Ramirez

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