The Turner Hall Ballroom is a huge room, and its to the credit of the promoters at the Pabst Theater Foundation that they’re often able to fill it, thanks to aggressive advertising and outreach campaigns that clue the city into shows that might otherwise fall under the radar. Even with the backing of the Pabst’s envious promotional budget and all the WUWM radio spots in the world, though, there are still plenty of shows that are just fundamentally too small for the cavernous, 900-person Turner Hall. That’s made for some awkwardly empty shows there, including memorably a Gang Gang Dance/Marnie Stern bill that, even after the cover charge was dropped, felt like a high-school dance nobody showed up for. The promoters avoided repeating that mistake for last night’s under-selling Holy Fuck show, relocating it from Turner Hall to the much cozier Riverwest club Mad Planet, where the shorter, more compact stage was a much better fit for the Canadian live electronica band and the modest crowd they drew.
Holy Fuck’s background in indie-rock and their strict belief in analogue instruments over computer programming suggests a joylessly academic interpretation of electronic music, but the group’s latest album, Latin, is rife with candied hooks and unabashed, four-on-the-floor groovesit’s the Tortoise album that wayward Tortoise fans have long secretly hoped that band might one day make.
The quartet’s live show was similarly less indebted to the slow-build of post-rock than the instant gratification of dance shows. Though the show included plenty of knob-twisting and patches of experimental ambiencekeyboardist Brian Borcherdt clicked away at an old film synchronizer, playing it like a percussive instrumentit was never too long until the next beat dropped.
The performance was enjoyed most ravenously by a guy with a nest of dreadlocks and another with baggy shorts and tall, colorful Dr. Seuss socks, who did much of the dancing for the appreciative but inhibited crowd, suggesting that if Holy Fuck wants to grow their audience beyond Mad Planet-sized venues, they might be better off focusing on the Relix and Bonnaroo set than the Pitchfork crowd to which they’ve mostly been marketed. They certainly deserve a bigger following, regardless of which sub-culture from which it’s culled.
|
|
Openers Nice Nice offered their own pared-down, two-man variation on Holy Fuck’s instrumental electronica, building edgier songs out of a precarious live loops and tense, forceful drums. It was less danceable than Holy Fuck’s set, but no less exciting to watch.
Photo by CJ Foeckler
