hsu@UICSRD.CSRD.UIUC.EDU (William Tsun-Yuk Hsu) (10/21/86)
CLUB CRACK/DIDJITS/URGE OVERKILL/BIG BLACK at Channing-Murray, Urbana IL 10/19/86 (Channing-Murray is this small church with usually neat movies on the weekends, and occasional hardcore shows and local bands.) Club Crack is a local 6-man outfit, the basic post-punk setup augmented by keyboards and an extra percussionist with metal sheet, pots and pans, etc. They play fairly interesting post-punk fare with swooping spacey synthesizer sounds and some neat bell-like sounds. Wicinski would hate the lead singer's quasi-Mick Jagger and death rock routines. Lots of good ideas; with more focus this could be a good band to watch. The Didjits came on and they rocked. First slamming session of the night started. They play good, tight hardcore, including a reconstruction of Great Balls of Fire and a cover of Baba O'Riley. Hardcore fans should check them out when they come into your area. (They're local but do have an album out somewhere...) Urge Overkill, your basic guitar/bass/drums post-punk trio from Chicago, continued the tale of the diminishing bands (Didjits was a quartet.) They play slower, thick, oozing slabs of noise in the spirit of Mission of Burma. Some wild numbers, but the crowd was probably quiet (and tired) after Didjits. They only heated up when one of the band members stomped on his guitar at the end. Big Black's set was almost a catalog of what could go wrong when you tour with a drum machine. It's credit to the band that the show was still exciting despite all their problems. (Albini said something silly like drum sets are too expensive.) Since the speakers were way in front of the band, they had to have the drum machine VERY loud to hear it from the stage. For some reason this caused lots of sound problems and Albini suggested wiping out the vocals (the crowd disagreed, of course. We all wanted to hear him make obscene noises in Jordan, Minnesota.:-)) The drum machine ended up drowning out a lot of the guitar and bass details, and the only times when you can really hear the intricate stuff was in Albini and Santiago's intros. There were also one or two false starts, also because of the drum machine. The high hats were inaudible most of the time until Albini made an effort to mix them in for Jordan MN and the last song. Albini was terrific to watch, a demon of energy on stage. He kept insisting that the drum machine has to be "painfully loud", and once in a while mumbled things like "I washed my guitar and now I can't do a damn thing with it." Once he did this fake Jordan MN-type intro and kicked into a different song when everyone started yelling Jordan MN. Exchange of the evening: JERK: Give back my 6 bucks!!! ALBINI: Your 6 bucks is up my ass, where you also left your wristwatch. They opened with Fists of Love, did a rather muffled version of Kerosene which had the crowd slamming in a frenzy, and had this great version of Jordan MN with a long jam in the middle. They made these wild airplane noises which were great and eerie in the church. They were more splotchy than I expected, but it was still an enthusiastic show. (Apparently somebody complained about the noise, so the police showed up near the end of the show. The crowd dispersed quietly after Big Black's set. No post-show yakking, talking with the bands, T-shirts or anything. Sigh.) Bill Hsu