Gig: FOUR CORNERS

FOUR CORNERS (feat. Anagram / No No Zero / Teenanger / Ancestors)

Steelworkers Hall. Friday, July 23, 2010.

Some ideas make so much sense, you wonder why they haven't already happened. What if instead of four bands playing one full set after another, the bands took turns each playing a song or two. Setup would be an issue — a stage wouldn't work for the turnovers. But what if you had all four bands set up at once in four corners of a room? Aha.

And so it was, down at the temple of labour on Cecil Street. A union hall isn't too different from a legion in its setup — plaques and trophies adorn the walls, giving a sense or organizational regimentation. Just substitute a different set of kitschy-cool photos and posters reflecting past glories and you're most of the way there. Both are places for organizing of different sorts, including the kind of organizing that means you need to have a bar on site. Here, we had a keg being tapped, selling gassy, foamy cheap beer.

This would, in fact, be the money-maker for the night as this was, quite incredibly, a free show. There was also a barbeque in action outside, dispensing hamburgers. A pretty sweet setup, and a nice little space outside to hang out in as the crowd gathered.

As the eleven o'clock starting time rolled around, I roused myself and headed into the multipurpose room set up for the gig. Not a big space, maybe ten yards by fifteen, and lots of gear occupying the fringes. The band setups were as blue-collar as the surroundings, guit/bass/drums all around and no fancy frills.¹ There was still a big lineup at the beer station for the slow-pumping keg, so it was a little while longer before bandmembers started filtering in, turning on amps and getting ready to go. If one hadn't figured it out already, it could now be observed that the people putting on guitars and so forth were the same ones who had been doing everything else out front — straight-up DIY and no division from the masses here, as you could buy a drink ticket and get your beer poured by the same guys who'd soon be cranking out the tunes.

By about 11:30 all the bandmembers have filtered into their corners, and the room is feeling pretty full and warming up already from body heat. I grabbed myself a spot more or less in the dead centre of the room, trying to find the sweet spot in a pretty unusual audio setup, PA's set up on all sides. Teenanger, bathed in red light in the room's south-east corner are up first, and the crowd sort of gravitates towards them as vocalist Riley Wild greets them with, "welcome to The Last Waltz!" before the band tore into it. The sound in the room was loud and snarl-y — just right for the music, in other words — though there was some extra feedback shrieks to start with. Playing straight-up garage-y rock'n'roll with scuzzy undertones, Teenanger blasted out a quick pair of songs, and then the lights went down in their corner.

Listen to a Teenanger song from this show here.

Before their last echoing guitar squeal died out, the yellow spotlights in the opposite corner came up and Ancestors flexed their heads playing faster, leaner, hardcore-informed songs. Their two tunes lasted only about three minutes flat, and then the baton was passed to No No Zero in the green corner. Their music had a gothabilly sort of humminahummina swagger, but with a punkrock thrust.² Shades of The Cramps, or, just perhaps, Deja Voodoo in their vaguely malicious bursts.

Listen to a couple of Ancestors' songs from this set here.

And then, speaking of malicious bursts, Anagram — with whom I was the most familiar of all these bands — doing "Evil" and the crowd-pleasing Cleavers cover "Fish". Though no less roiling than the other bands, Anagram's music was the least inclined to quick blasts of aggression — well-known for settling in on a groove in live performance, they could hold a chord and churn away for a stretch longer than some of the entire songs of the bands around them.

And then back around for the second lap. Teenanger's sound was a bit cleaner this time, the stray feedback howls now tamed. Ancestors sounded angrier, like they were just now getting properly worked up, and No No Zero worked in some more back-and-forth vocals from Sian Llewelyn.

Listen to a couple No No Zero songs from this show here.

Once things were really going, it was about a million degrees in the room — the cement walls were clammy and dripping with precipitation. The floor was slick with spilled beer, sloshed around as the crowd surged from corner to corner. Maybe these bands weren't predisposed to banter anyways, but the format here cut down on that even more. With one band starting up right on the heels of the last one finishing, it cut out that between-song time when the band might chat with the crowd.

There were four cycles through the bands, and like a bottle being passed around, things got more staggery-wayward as things went on. And a helluva lot of songs, even if they were mostly quick. By the time Anagram's last turn trough came around with "What a Mess", I was feeling pretty punchy — and I'd mostly just been holding down my spot in the centre of the room. Some of the people weaving around me were looking downright exhausted.

Listen to an Anagram song from this show here.

And thus the show lurched to the grand finale, with all four corners joining together for a bashed-out rendition of The Stooges' "Ann". The drummers were just out-of-sync enough across the room to lend it a queasy feeling. It was exhaustedly ragged and desperate, which is probably the most befitting way to end. After the noisy crescendo of that, people started staggering out of the room as the DJ started back up, the PA telling us that after laughter comes tears. Outside in the nightcool air, people were sprawling out, collapsing like they'd just finished a 10K run.

Listen to the monumental grand finale here.

It's a brilliant show concept — live without dead time, and all of that — though its sheer unusualness probably added to the excitement of it. I imagine it also took some extra technical work (and extra gear) to pull off four band setups.³ But it worked out pretty well. Kudos to the bands for putting on a show like this for free — it felt less like a regular gig and more like an event to be remembered.

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¹ There's probably an inneresting investigation to be made by someone cleverer than me into why, in the context of this show, guit/bass/drums are instinctively blue collar while, say, laptops and woodwind sections would be effete and/or elitist.

² In fact, thrusting would be an apt description for No No Zero's lyrical direction as well, as their album Rough Stuff is thoroughly concerned with all manners of below-the-belt activities.

³ I didn't make a note of who was doing sound at this show, but kudos are deserved there as well — given the unorthodox setup, it was exceptional work.