Rangda
DEBUT RECORD ON DRAG CITY - May 18, 2010
Excerpt from a review of the premier show (Sept. 12, 2009)
After a lengthy break, the crowd was treated to the main event: the unveiling of a new supergroup consisting of friends Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance, Comets on Fire), and Chris Corsano. The online marquee promised a night of free-form jazz but the trio of Bishop/Chasny/Corsano weren’t about to remotely hit a jazz note, launching into a skronk-filled seizure of psychedelia and classic rock. Bishop’s Middle Eastern influences were absent, Chasny’s folk tendencies replaced by angry spasms of punchy guitar, and Corsano’s arms became the envy of Stretch Armstrong. Over the course of 40 minutes and 5 songs, the newly minted group switched between early 80s no-wave the likes of Teenage Jesus and Sonic Youth and more melodic psychedelia that has been neglected in the style’s decade long resurgence. The one truth of the evening was that each and every note, chord, and drum smack was pure rock and roll ooze. Bishop and Chasny played with an old abandon once familiar to 70s arena rock, though the glossy production and slick stage show was replaced by the blood and guts of genre that has been quartermained in every direction the past 30 years. The crowd was immediately sucked in, with bearded and bespectacled masses bobbing heads and thrashing arms in unison—some wallflowers of course stuck to hands in pocket and eyes on shoes but that’s to be expected in a world where dancing and movement have been relegated to signs of pop dominance, not physical displays of appreciation. Perhaps when the trio’s album arrives in the near future (they are currently in a Seattle studio working on an album with Scott Colburn), everyone will let their guard down and cut loose like Bishop, Chasny, and Corsano did that fateful Saturday evening.
