[Phoenix] I
was here to see this band, and the prospect of seeing this band was more
exciting than any show since… SXSW. And although the earlier time slot was
nice, I was pissed they weren’t headliners because they should have been. After
this show, I blame this on the band. To provide some background [even though I’m
tired of hearing myself go on about Jay Reatard and Alicja Trout (but I just
can’t quit them)], Destruction Unit’s Ryan "Elvis" Wong (Rousseau)
was in one of Reatard’s first bands, The Reatards. He was also in Digital
Leather with Reatard & Trout, a band I’m more familiar with than
Destruction Unit, and like a lot. He’s also got a whole slew of other undergroundly-respected
bands. Destruction Unit has been on my radar for a long time but just don’t
have a real online presence, and when I finally saw them at SXSW this year, it
was a ridiculously hot show on a sidewalk… So this show helped me understand
why Destruction Unit and Ryan Wong-whatever are like a bad boyfriend,
impossible to be close with. The second they started I could tell he was
afflicted with what afflicted Reatard: an over-abiding love for noisy
discordance. Noisy discordance can be great when it is tempered by some
coherence & elegance, which I realize more & more only happened when
Alicja Trout was involved. She was the Mark Frost to Jay Reatard (& Ryan
Wong’s) David Lynch. I recognized two guys from the band before the show
started. The rat-ish looking boy (in a cute way) stood out with his spiky
faux-clean-cut haircut, white pants, and a white shirt in a crowd dressed
entirely in black. His skinny white jeans were sagging with sweat and dirt and
I could smell his stank as he walked by. Every move he made demonstrated he
cares less than you do. Sexy. And I’m serious – another problem with being a
Dara. He was excited to see me too…. or was trying to figure out if he’d
actually identified a groupie in the crowd. The other is tall, lanky, looks
like he’s lived hard – tonight he almost looked like a country boy with his
plaid shirt and boot cut corduroy pants. After internet searches, I think the
latter is Ryan Wong, but I’m not positive. So in addition to their total
avoidance of marketing themselves, this Ryan Wong fellow seems to purposely not
want a definable persona or a steady band, or even a steady sound. Like I said,
classic bad boyfriend. So when I saw them in Austin, there were three sweaty
members. Tonight, there were some six, seven sweaty members. Outside of the two
standouts already mentioned, the other standouts included the adorable proud
naturally-pompadeur-ed drummer in a Nu Sensae t-shirt (Nu Sensae were one of
the thirty bands of hundreds that made my top list during SXSW research this
year), and the bizarrely not-of-this-time-or-world prog metal guy with long
curly hair and a vaguely European jacket. There were one or two other
average-joe band members. So, after all this bitching, they were great. They
lead me to invent a potentially entirely new genre: stoner punk. The music was
jammy, extended, but seriously hard and underlaid with real hooks. Stoner metal
is repetitive and methodical, which doesn’t fit the creativity of their music.
Punk doesn’t work because punkers don’t understand the value of lingering and
getting caught in a moment. Wong mentioned in an online interview that he was a
fan of The Ponys and I could hear similarities (the reverb, the hooks and pop
sensibilities). The non-ness of the vocals made me think of Minor Threat. The
band before also took us on “interesting” journeys, but this band’s journeys
were ones you wanted to go on. Their music may have been laden with hooks, but
the amounts of time they spent on reverb and extended squall made it clear they
want to remain inaccessible. Several of the band members spent the entire set
turned away from the audience. After what felt like three songs, they closed by
abruptly starting to wrap up their cords. And while I understand the
motivation, the sentiment, the quest for authenticity, they left me bereft… like
a bad boyfriend. If Reatard, like Cobain, killed himself because he couldn’t
stand himself as a superstar, then Wong may be ensuring his long life by
ensuring that his music will never be heard by more than a select group. Nonetheless,
it makes me sad they don’t respect their fans enough to think they might get
it, and that their innovative authentic sound is never going to touch more than
a few people. (Photo courtesy of discog)
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