Dancing with Spiders from Space
Space
with Muse
The Starfish Room
Vancouver, B.C.
Monday, June 9, 1997
Review by Darren Kerr
Photography by Rodney Gitzel
Everybody has bands that they love which have become footnotes,
bands for magazines like Mojo, Ptolemaic Terrascope
and, once in a cream cheese moon, Rolling Stone or Spin
to write an inspired piece on every four or five years. The Sensational
Alex Harvey Band was one of these. Alex Harvey was a hybrid of
Keith Moon-ish schoolboy mischief and leprechaun malevolence,
and Space, from Liverpool, is the only entity I've come across
that can carry that long dormant torch, the one to combine the
leer of Fagin, the cheeky confidence of the Artful Dodger and
the menace of Bill Sykes into one creatively wicked band. On their
maiden album, Spiders, Space put Western pop icons into
a taffy puller, add calypso and cabaret, reggae and mop-top, fake
vampire teeth and pop rocks to come up with a pastiche of fresh
tunes and sounds that'll cling to your thing for days.
But first we have to bask in the lukewarmth of Muse, who take
all the elements of pop that I like -- noisy, heavily-effected
guitars, big, bad and bouncy drums and that cool "I'm choking
on sentiment" voice -- and mold them into something dull
and shapeless. The singer sounded like Brett Anderson, fey and
nasally, and of course very British... sad thing is, these
guys are from Miami. The guitars were total
Corgan and Iha, with
octave notes being the mode of the day. I quite liked the drummer
who flogged the skins in the style of Ginger Baker or, to be more
recent, Reef's Domenic Greensmith. I didn't like the band's set
all that much, though, because I'll be damned if I could distinguish
any one song from any other song.
Space, on the other hand, put on an incredibly strong show. They
opened with the keyboard-driven guitar-stomper "Me and You
vs. the World" and never let up until the last encore, which
was, er, "Me and You vs. the World."
You could not tear your eyes from the stage, and even the fidgety
stared transfixed by the lads from Liverpool. Singers Tommy and
James were very charismatic. The former had a presence like Keith
Moon drunk on clockwork orange, lunging forward and leaping all
over the place, all the while his voice never wavering. The latter
elicited a cool bohemian quality with his hat barely above his
eyes and shocks of curly red hair hanging out. "We're not
English. We're scouses, scouses come from Venus," he said
lasciviously, tongue firmly in cheek.
It's hard to put into words just how good this show was. Franny,
the keyboard player, was grinning like a cheshire cat. It is his
synth lines which provide colour and atmosphere, especially in
tonight's rendition of "Neighbourhood," which featured
his eerie science fiction theremin-type sounds. Near the conclusion,
he was given the spotlight all to himself as the rest of the band
left the stage, leaving him to perform their sole true techno
song "Growler." Talking indecipherables through his
headset microphone, Franny was a moon-faced DJ serving up the
break beats.
The crowd really got into the show -- I didn't even write any
notes because I was too busy dancing like everyone else -- and
the band fed off that energy. "Dark Clouds" felt like
an 80's classic with its chorus projecting big around the room.
"No One Understands" and "Voodoo Roller" rocked
hard with drummer Andy's snare and tom dexterity; in fact, Andy was rock
solid throughout the whole set. After two encores (including,
by request, the opening song again, played with even more verve
and vigour than before), people left the Starfish drenched in
sweat and their musical appetites totally sated.
Screw the whole Oasis
vs. Blur dogfight and get yerself a copy
of Spiders, 'cause Space are the shit... really!
First published in Drop-D Magazine on June 26, 1997
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