Matt Schimkowitz: The 45 Years Of Violent Femmes Tour
I’ve been a fan of Violent Femmes since picking up a copy of their second LP, the haunting Hallowed Ground, in college. With its supremely creepy and oblique cover image that looks like a mummified child (it’s actually a sculpture by the late folk artist Mary Nohl, who hailed from the band’s native Wisconsin), the album sounded to my unacquainted ears like a lost artifact conjured by Appalachian hill people and dumped in a used bin for $3.99. Eschewing the upbeat pop sensibilities of their self-titled 1983 debut, Hallowed Ground exorcises the demons of singer-songwriter Gordon Gano’s Baptist upbringing, its lyrics suffused with religious terror that would make even an ardent atheist quake. It’s been a go-to album for me ever since, but until last week, I’d never been to one of the band’s concerts. Thankfully, they’re currently on a hefty “45 Years of Violent Femmes” tour, including the four-night residency at the Bellwether in Los Angeles, where I saw them play their first two albums in their entirety.
The desperate thrills of Hallowed Ground—which, to my surprise, made up the show’s opening set—take on a different, more joyful flavor live. The bells-heavy “I Hear The Rain” created a remarkable interplay between audience and performers, giving the crowd an easy chant-along as the band’s three voices circled the wagon—a dynamic that carried through the album’s hardest cuts, “Never Tell” and “Hallowed Ground.” There’s nothing quite like hearing a crowd of people wail, “I’ve had so much on my mind, I was so glad when I died!” A highlight, for me anyway, was the album’s often derided centerpiece, the scratchy “Jesus Walking On The Water,” which is a true-blue barnburner live.
It was all bolstered by the band’s incredible musicianship. Gano cycled through instruments, dropping his Telecaster for a banjo or fiddle depending on what the song called for. Meanwhile, John Sparrow, who’s been drumming for the Femmes since 2005, supplemented his pared-down kit with a Weber grill, which is both utterly charming and completely effective. But the real star was bassist Brian Ritchie, whose rubbery solos, which anchor so much of Hallowed Ground, bellowed from his massive acoustic four-string.
After a brief intermission, the band returned to play Violent Femmes. Hallowed Ground benefits from its shakiness, but that first record is diamond cut, replacing the anguished spirituals with the adolescent sexual angst of “Kiss Off,” “Please Don’t Go,” and, of course, “Blister In The Sun.” (Which is to say nothing of “Prove My Love” and “Add It Up.”) And to top it all off, they closed with a pair of fan-favorites, “I Held Her In My Arms” and “American Music.” I’m not always a fan of the “full album tour” and its strict limitations. Not so with the Femmes. “45 Years Of Violent Femmes” meant hearing every song I could ever hope to hear the band play, performed with an exuberance that more than matched the audience’s.
Erik Adams: Allegro Non Troppo
When the indispensable animation distributor GKIDS acquired the North American rights to the films of Bruno Bozzetto earlier this year, their first order of business involved putting a restored version of Bozzetto’s best known work, Allegro Non Troppo, into theaters. You’ll often hear the film described as a parody of Fantasia (usually within the same breath as a description of its director’s reverence for the golden era of Disney animation), but I think that sets the wrong kind of expectations. Allegro Non Troppo is pretty unsparing about the toil of animation, the fraught relationship between art and capital, and the general chintziness of show business—views largely articulated through the vaudevillian slapstick of its black-and-white live-action interstitials. But some very European, very 1970s flourishes aside—Greek-mythological horniness matched to Debussy, a machine-gun burst of caustic blackout gags in the finale—Bozzetto’s visualizations of classical compositions are as earnest, varied, and stunningly rendered as anything in Walt Disney’s psychedelic masterpiece.
They’re also, on occasion, more technically accomplished. It makes sense that Allegro Non Troppo might have more advanced methods at its disposal, given the 36 years between its release and Fantasia’s. But I don’t think it was until the height of the film’s storied centerpiece—an evolutionary chain marching to the beat of Maurice Ravel’s Boléro—that when the pictures start moving in Allegro Non Troppo, they don’t stop moving. Bootleg Boléros have circulated on YouTube for years, but you truly can’t get a sense of what a creative feat the thing is if its morphing forms and brilliant colors aren’t flashing in front of your face 20some feet high. Fortunately, the 2K restoration is still making the theatrical rounds; New York City’s Metrograph even paired it with Fantasia back in March. If you have even a passing interest in cartoons, I can’t recommend catching a screening enough—and I’m eager to see what release GKIDS pulls from the Bozzetto archives next.
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