music
There are new fliers around the Satellite Ballroom tonight: Two hang loosely from the PA system near the stage, a third sits above the bar and all of them read: “Have Fun. No Stage Diving. No Crowd Surfing.”
Danny Shea, manager of Plan 9’s Corner location and booking agent for the Ballroom, says that the fliers are up specifically for the evening’s show. “In case things get out of hand,” he says.
 Auditory arsonists the Blood Brothers threw caution to the wind during a set at the Satellite Ballroom. |
The flimsy warnings hold up for the set by Richmond’s Ultra Dolphins, shaking slightly but, miraculously, not giving way under drummer Frayser Micou’s erratic snare rolls. Instead, the words seem to shake on the page like the tattered edges of Micou’s cracked crash cymbal while guitarist Nate Rappole crouches low to play searing octave notes before rocking back and forth uncontrollably. At the set’s end, Rappole sends his guitar into the audience to be abused, but the audience, timid, gives it back without detuning it.
One of the fliers disappears during the midst of Celebration’s set, but its absence goes mostly unnoticed thanks to slinky vocalist Katrina Ford. With the looks of Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and the voice of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O, Ford is a feast for the only senses that matter at a rock show—the eyes and the ears. Four songs into Celebration’s set, Ford’s “come back to bed” panting pairs beautifully with her band’s keyboards and dance-funk drumming; by the set’s end, Celebration introduces a second drum kit just to keep up with their feral frontwoman and the erotic rhythms she evokes.
By the time the Blood Brothers tear into “Set Fire to the Face on Fire” from their scuzzy, brilliantly demented record, Young Machetes, warnings on paper are irrelevant because paper can be ripped to shreds. Nobody dives from the stage or receives a boot to the head from a crowd surfer, but the audience loses all rationality; they thrash below the stage like kids pulled through the bars of a lion’s cage at the zoo, while vocalists Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney screech “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
The pure physical reaction of the crowd during songs like “Ambulance vs. Ambulance” and “Peacock Skeleton with Crooked Feathers” is ferocious and, by the end of the Blood Brothers’ set, warnings are burned down to ash and forgotten altogether.
