Dungen @ The Picadork

First of all, let me just say how badassed Dungen was on Monday night. I was way tired before I even headed out the door and a couple of additional surprises awaited me when I arrived at The Picador, but by the time Dungen took the stage, any worry of lack of sleep was gone.
Actually, the second wind began with openers Woods-a band I wasn’t familiar with prior to the show, but ended up becoming one before I left. The cool thing was how their live show turned me on to them and how I got up close to the action totally by accident.
You see, The Picador seemed to have overbooked or quietly neglected to tell us who don’t tweet with members of the Picador tastemakers. What this meant to me was that I missed nothing when I arrived 45 minutes after the doors nothing and got two extra bands to check out before Woods and Dungen even played a note.
Who were the bands?
Couldn’t fucking tell you. They weren’t on any of the Super Rock Calendar lists that I could see, they barely had a P.A. to work with when they did perform and even if they did mention who they were, you could barely understand a word that was uttered through the shitty set up.
Woods and Dungen had their stuff on stage with little room to spare, which meant the extra two bands were forced to set up their shit on the floor directly in front of the stage. How was the view? As good as you might imagine. People circled the bands as they performed, which meant if you were in “row” two or beyond, you pretty much would have to be content with looking at the moles on the neck of the dude in front of you.
The first band didn’t even mic up their instruments and I’m pretty sure that the P.A. in use wasn’t the house unit. It was amateur night, and that’s not even addressing the bands that performed. No, their only fault would be in the lack of self-promotion (say your name-play a song-refer people to meet you at the merch table-repeat), but you can’t help but wonder how long this venue will remain open when they have people booking shows with no grasp of logistics and who do a real disservice to their patrons and the artists themselves by allowing such a thing to happen in a place with a storied history.
I mean, this is the type of shit that a high school kid would do when booking punk rock shows. If you’re going to give a couple of extra bands a chance to work, then at least give them a stage to work with.
Ultimately, the two bands weren’t that band-with the second one throwing together a nifty little set of drones, primitive beats, and distorted vocals. It reminded me of Suicide in some respects, albeit with shittier equipment, but I couldn’t tell you who made the racket thanks to my previous complaints.
So I could have sworn they were Woods; people seemed to have known about them or at the very least entertained like me by their fairly novel approach to no wave remembrance. This led me to head for the stage thinking that Dungen was next, only to realize after Woods’ vocalist Jeremy Earl stepped up to the mic and announced “We’re Woods.”
See kids?
What seemed to set Woods apart from other low-fi peers is an abundant urge to rock out. Occasionally, Galaxie 500 would come close, but because of the limitations of being in a barely-able-to-play-our-instruments-power-trio, they infrequently achieved rawk ‘n’ roll liftoff. One of my favorite Galaxie songs was actually a cover of Joy Division’s “Ceremony” because it turned into this raucous song that bettered the original. Admittedly, it bettered it only because you can’t find a decent recording of JD’s version, aside from New Order’s take on it after Ian listened to The Idiot one too many times.
While Earl sounds a tad like Dean Wareham, he can sure outsolo him on the geetar-a chipped up Silvertone that he only replaced once.
The replacement guitar happened to be an equally worn acoustic whose guitar-strap peg broke when he began playing “The Number.”
Woods has an even bigger weirdo than Jeremy Earl, and the dude plays a cassette player and an echoplex unit or some shit. G. Lucas Crane spread out some hand-me-down covers, then plopped his knees on them and began working some strange sonic madness with his devices, all housed in a handmade case made of two-by-fours. He’s like the 13th Floor Elevators’ Tommy Hall if he’d traded his electric jug in for a portable cassette player and some speedy hits of lsd.
I could have been somewhat content after Woods’ set, but it was Dungen’s performance that finally managed me to crack a smile. They pulled heavily from Ta Det Lugnt and 4. The key-laden softer moments were nice and gave the members a chance to shine, but it was the heavier acid-trip moments that I totally get hard for.
Guitarist Reine Fiske is pretty awesome and…well to be honest, all of the members seem to know exactly what they’re doing. Dungen’s leader Gustav Ejstes smiled much of the night and seemed to actually enjoy playing in front of about 75 people in a shitty club in Iowa.
As the night wore on, the crowd began getting thinner. “We love Sweden!” shouted one young girl directly behind me. This prompted a smile from Ejstes, who then began a series of we’re not worthy bows to the crowd, maybe even acknowledging the high concentration of Swedish and Norweigean immigrants that eventually ended up right here in the Midwest. As a matter of fact, in my parents house right now is the very trunk that my great-great Granparents used when traveling from Sweden to the fertile grounds of Southwest Iowa. They also have the Bible that they carried with them, printed in Sweedish-evidently the only reading material they took from their home land.
Ejstes and the rest of the band seemed to be spending the next day sightseeing; I noticed the manager checking out some of the attractions around the Fond du Lac, Wisconsin area-including a water park in the vicinity.
“I know I said I wanted to go out tonight….but I’m so tired” admitted the girl behind me after one gentle song in Dungen’s set. What may have been an attempt to keep us all in the club for as long as possible to capture as many drinking dollars as possible didn’t seem to make much sense in retrospect. Were there others that may have considered going out who decided against it based on the late start? Were less drinks consumed because more people were concerned that they’d have less time to recouperate over night (I know I did: my drinks were limited to a pair of Pepsi’s)? Are these the kind of decisions being made by the Picador staff now that they’ve saved a little dough by shipping out Roberson? This was my first time in the place since he was canned, and it did feel a little like being a traitor in some respects, but it did have an even bigger vibe of disorganization in another. I certainly wouldn’t stop from going to see a band that I was hellbent on seeing if they were playing at The Picador-I just wouldn’t expect the club to actually give a shit on making sure my experience as a customer was semi-decent. Now that Roberson’s gone and all of the past has been excavated, all that remains is a shell of club with no personality and no attempt to even create one. While that may be sad, at least there was a pair of really good bands performing on Monday night to erase all of that and to eliminate time itself.
A full review on the show itself can be found here.