At The Drive-In Play Riotous Show, Grip Crowd

by Jacob Kramer-Duffield 
11/3/00

You know those short kids that always get picked on, never really talk and just play music all the time? Yeah, well those kids put on a kick-ass show at the ’Sco Wednesday night, kicking the ass sonically that they never could physically. 
Starting off the night were Bluetip, a solid DC foursome whose only weakness was their short set. They began by saying “Hi, we’re Bluetip and we’re going to try and play as many songs as we can in the time we have,” and scarcely stopped for a breath until their set was over, going so far as to tune their guitars mid-song. 

The crowd started small and gradually filtered in through Bluetip’s generally well-received set. Bluetip’s no-nonsense rock was infused with the energy one would expect from a punk band but featured some surprising and unanticipated variations. With a solid bass and back beat providing foundation, the guitars often seemed to clang at angles off the rafters and through the ether. The urgent vocals added to the sense of energetic disconnection that a disappointingly-small portion of the final attendees were able to experience. 
Batting second Wednesday evening were the Murder City Devils, and where shortness of set was a weakness for Bluetip, it was a downright tragedy for the Devils. To say the six-piece musical wrecking crew were “on” would be an understatement. In the words of Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel, they went to 11. 
Since the ’Sco is the acoustic equivalent of a shoebox, the Devils’ haunting organ was at the forefront of only a few songs, whereas their studio sound puts it at the heart of nearly every tune on the most recent album. Lead singer Spencer Moody was in top form, meaning that the sound he produced was somewhere between Iggy Pop and a drunk hobo. When combined with the red backlighting through most of their set, the overall effect was that the Devils seemed to be broadcasting from some other dimension — in a good way. 
The Devils mixed in old favorites (which for a large part of the crowd were sing-alongs) with new material. They were perhaps at their best on “Idle Hands,” a cut from their latest album, In Name and Blood. There was an urgency to the song that really put a twitch into you, an authenticity that made you remember why you love music. Which, in short, was what Wednesday night was all about. 

Finishing off the night with the longest set were At the Drive-In. And good God, their publicity photos don’t even begin to do justice to these boys’ hair. Nor can their albums do real justice to the performance ATDI put on at the ’Sco. Their energy was such that it seemed they might well transcend traditionalboundaries and limitations like matter and time. Lead singer Cedric was downright lemur-like, brachiating off of the pipes in the ceiling and jumping off the drum set, swinging and catching his mic like it was on fire. The set opened hard and built from there, energizing the crowd further and further. 

At one point late in the set a few overexuberant fans began moshing and were duly admonished by the band. And rightly so, this just wasn’t the place (not an “oi” in earshot, to be sure). 
When all was said and done, ATDI put in one of the finest bits of music-making that Oberlin has heard in a while. At one point, a fellow concert-goer turned to me and said, “They’re such rock stars,” and they were right, but perhaps not in the sense they meant. ATDI is a band that simply knows how to put on a show, that simply knows how to rock. They were, however, just a bunch of guys, a fact reinforced to me while checking my e-mail in Wilder previous to the show. Who should walk in but Cedric and the Murder City Devils’ drummer, Coady, who had to walk Cedric through every step of checking his Hotmail. Not dumb rock stars, per se, but just a bunch of guys who really know how to rock.