Gig: Six Finger Satellite

Six Finger Satellite / The Chinese Stars / Sensitive Hearts

The Garrison. Friday, October 23, 2009.

On a miserably cold, wet night, made the trip over to "the culture's new centre of gravity", Dundas and Ossington, to pay my first visit to The Garrison. A new venture from Shaun Bowring, ex-booker for Sneaky Dee's, giving it something of a prima facie trademark of quality, like, if something is booked there, you get the idea it might be worth investigating, even if you don’t know who the act by name.

Inside, the separated front bar had tables scattered around in a lounge-type space — looks inviting and has definite hang-out potential.¹ Heading back into the venue proper, everything still seemed new enough to smell the paint drying. At this early point, the place is not exhibiting much in the way of personality. A fairly wide room, walls and ceiling flat black and red, it still the sense of the sports club that was previously in in here — a single lonely pool table remains, pushed up against a wall opposite the bar, and in a hallway beside the stage, a foosball table has been unceremoniously shoved down at the far end. The bar itself looks slight and unadorned. A reasonable-sized stage, and raised higher than Sneaky Dee's or the 'Shoe, meaning, with the absence of sightline-blocking poles or other obstacles, there should be good views from most anywhere in the room. The bathrooms were adequate — the mens' in the back a coffin-narrow aisle of urinals.² It’s funny how all of the bricabrac that your normally filter out — peeling band stickers, neon beer signs — resonate so strongly in their absence. Maybe it's because because it’s too new to be worn down or dank that it feels so generic. Maybe its biggest crime, the wide, featureless space with plenty elbow room, is that it feels suburban — not downtown, grimy, crammed together. It’s like a Jack Astor's just pulled out or something.

I think a lot of this will improve with a little wear and tear to give the place that "lived in" feeling. And it might well feel a lot different with a full house — and some of that loudness might end up bouncing around a lot less. Like I said, the biggest draw is the quality of the talent up on stage — the rest is window dressing.

Anyways, on this night I was at the new venue to see an old band. Though they were never number one in my heart or anything, I listened to a decent amount of Six Finger Satellite back in the day, and, at the other end of this decade, when all of this dance-friendly post-punk appeared seemingly out of nowhere, I sort of shrugged and told people, "ah, they're just ripping off Six Finger Satellite." Now the band is back, fashionably late enough that they can't really be accused of trying to cash in on a trend that they foreshadowed.

Openers were Sensitive Hearts, a co-ed synthpop duo from 6FS home base Providence, Rhode Island. They started things off by showing a satiric video ("How to Meet Mr. Right") that nailed the early-80's production values they were sending up, but was sadly lacking in any comedic punch. The band's music, which had a similarly winking retro element, fortunately fared better. Not strikingly innovative by any means, but with animated videos projected behind them, it was good fun. As the band's set progressed, the music moved from fluffy DOR to a harder-edged sound, lending a bit of an Ex-Lion Tamer element to the performance, as their music recalled the fat-analog-synth side of Six Finger Satellite that the band has largely dropped in their current incarnation.³ Not memorable, but nothing to sneeze at.

It had occurred to me during the days leading up to the show that outside some decidedly unhelpful album covers, I had no notion what the members of Six Finger Satellite looked like. This thought came back to me during The Chinese Stars' set, as, had I walked into the venue with them already on stage, I might well have believed they were the headliners, based on their sound. It turns out to be not so surprising that there's some conceptual overlap, given that 6FS drummer Rick Pelletier was a founding member of the band, although no longer playing with them. In face, when bassist V. Von Ricci switched over to keyb, this'd be the closest the night'd get to Severe Exposure-esque sine-wave terror. Not that Chinese Stars were merely rehashing someone else's sound — with Eric Paul's spastic-on-helium vox, they were clearly working out their own thing. With insistent, trebly guitar leads and a solid beatkeeper, the sonic elements are in place here to impress. There weren't a lot of catchy choruses on hand, but that seems part and parcel of the band's mildly abrasive aesthetic. A hard-hitting half-hour that set a fairly high standard for the headliner to beat.

Listen to a track from this set here.

Coming in, I hadn't put much work into finding out what the reconstituted version of the band sounded like. I knew that John MacLean (now a/k/a The Juan MacLean) was no longer in the band, instead continuing his solo career exploring in more of a house music direction. When the band took the stage, there was a keyboard bassline, howling guit and clenched vocal, and it clicked into place. The band, it can be said, sounded like themselves — but in a sort of atavistic way, as if that whole career path where the keyboards took over their music had been reversed. Playing almost entirely tracks from their new release A Good Year For Hardness, I also gathered the impression that in this current incarnation the band was also less interested in immediate catchy hookiness than the clobbering groove — sorta a thinking man's pigfuck music. Frontman J. Ryan embodied this, in jeans and a simple black t-shirt, striking a sort of amiably macho stance, like a construction worker out on the weekend blowing off steam. Of the new material, Harness lead-off track "Hot Food" was perhaps the most effective, with Ryan's keyb squalls cutting against the pummelling rhythm.

The band played ten songs in fifty minutes and the reception was kind but not rapturous. I'm guessing like me, there were a fair number of curiosity-seekers in the crowd, perhaps some of whom might have been more enthusiastic to get a rehash of the tunes they remembered from days gone by. If nothing else, give credit to 6FS for turning the page and working their new stuff hard — as if declaring they were out-of-step with the times the first time 'round, and they're not going to pander now that music'd caught up to 'em some. It was a workmanlike show, solid and uncompromising, and if they didn't steal everyone's heart, and least they managed to put a boot in.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ One could also imagine the front room as a destination for those who didn't bring their earplugs. As I'd heard from several sources, the sound in the back is staggeringly loud. I had no complaints with the system's sound quality, but I'd have been fine with a few less dB's.

² Revealing moment of self-reflection — why do none of the other blogs ever take notice of what the bathrooms are like at various venues? Do the other bloggers never have to pee?

³ Note to Sensitive Hearts: consider adding a cover of "Rabies (Baby's Got The)" to the setlist.