Sisters of Mercy/A Cloud of Ravens, May 23, 2023 at Hollywood Palladium

Sisters of Mercy were a bucket list band, not that I was a huge fan, but I liked them and they like me back to some days with Gothy music helped get me through (even if I wasn't Gothy (at least on the outside)). They were active but never did a lot of dates, especially Stateside, so seeing them on their own would be its own accomplishment. Also the fact that they were already old (though maybe immortal for all their Gothness), and only getting older, so time could have been running out. Chiefly, Corey had an extra ticket (as he often does, and I don’t even mind not being who he intended to take when he get to the tickets). He came up, we met at my place in Fullerton, then we drove out to L.A. We even got there on time, since Corey hasn’t gone to enough concerts to want to narrow his time to just what he wants to see, so we saw opener A Crowd of Ravens. It was just a dude and a chick, playing guitar and bass with everything else canned, and we didn’t know about them before and hadn’t heard anything about them since. Most notably they carried the Goth theme that had descended heavily on the place, appropriate to the Sisters, and more than a little callback to Club Metro which is where I was introduced, almost intimately, to the Sisters and Goth culture. Corey fit right in, but the whole place also could have been a Metro reunion (or at least everyone looked they could be, and the age range -- for Sisters fandom and Metro attendance -- would have been about right. I can’t call them out on being old because I'm there too. But it’s a shame they can’t age better if they’re going to live forever). Everyone, including the band, were covered in so many layers (of black) and make-up that it was hard to discern an age, but that’s also probably the point. I might have made an attempt to dress in black, but like then as now, I didn’t care so much (though among all the outcasts, I could be the outcast). I can only see the culture from the outside, but even for all the trappings of Goth and how they helped engender it, the Sisters always could have been a rock band as much as a Goth band, maybe more; rock for the music, Goth for the image (if that was even more just for wearing dark colors). But Goth is immortal, and Eldritch keeps living on, even sparing himself in concert by only singing and leaving the music to the band, even relieving them of having a drummer by employing a drum machine instead. Synthesizers also made up for the range of orchestral flourishes in most of their tunes, and if Eldritch was the main show in the first place, his presence and anything he did was enough. He prowled the stage in frontman fashion, putting on some kind of show, and performing even if the backing track wasn’t completely live. The songs were changed up slightly, a necessary refreshening for music decades old (though you’d think dust would add some authenticity), or at least had some artistic care to reshape them over the time in place of a new album since 1990. “More,” what I would have picked as their biggest hit (or at least the song that Metro played the most), was a touch more subtle, turning down its rock edge, maybe to concede for placing it more firmly as a moody Goth anthem. The encore could have dragged with “This Corruption,” but it’s more a surprise when that song is almost 10 minutes long since it moves so well, that a drawn-out performance that threatened to last forever would have been appropriate. Then it was over so all the Goths could fade back into the night (then their well-lit day-jobs and kids (and grandkids)). We went back to the parking lot at the 24 Hour Fitness then drove back to Orange County and a late-night dinner at Denny’s, yet another concession to the habits from the old days of Metro.

Sisters of Mercys’ set-list:

"Don't Drive on Ice"

"Crash and Burn"

"Ribbons"

"Alice"

"I Will Call You"

"Arms"

"But Genevieve"

"Dominion / Mother Russia"

"Summer"

"Show Me"

"Marian"

"More"

"Instrumental 86"

"Doctor Jeep / Detonation Boulevard"

"Eyes of Caligula"

"Something Fast"

"Here"

"On the Beach"

"When I'm on Fire"

"Temple of Love" (with Terri Nunn)

"Lucretia My Reflection"

"This Corrosion"

A Crowd Of Ravens’ set-list:

"The Tempest"

"The Blackest Mantra"

"Old Ghosts"

"The Earthen Call"

"When It Comes"

"The Reaping Wheel"

"Requiem for the Sun"

"Sacrosanct"

"Sympathy for the Devil" (The Rolling Stones cover)

"Parable"

Massive Attack, September 5, 2019 at the Hollywood Palladium

Trip-hop didn’t do much for me in the ‘90s save for maybe Portishead or Ruby (the lack of range between the two showing how far I didn't go with it), but as usual Carla had already been to anything cool no matter how obscure (or obscured). It was easy to bring me into Massive Attack as they soundtracked some of our early, special moments together, but they were really something I should known about on my own. I knew them from a few remixed tracks and they had a great visual design, but it wasn’t as much as it should have been. I still wasn’t completely sold when we got the tickets if they were just another alt band years past their height (though being British helped), but I got it later, catching up before the show (originally set for May) so I could appreciate it properly. This was a performance of Mezzanine, apparently their biggest album, but I’d picked up enough by then to know that they weren’t sticking only to that album but letting other stuff weave into the set. They certainly played the whole album, as advertised, but in their own order with other tracks mixed in (all covers that had been so fundamentally transformed that I realized they were credited to having played only when I looked at the set-list), which inferred that they were leaving out anything else from their other albums in deference to their own whims. But they had the guest-stars who originally performed those songs, and that was enough. Even if they weren't really performing in the tradition sense, they had done the heavy lifting of creation years before already, which they represented, and it was the best they could do with the magnificence they'd created and now returned to (if that was only a version as a starting point for what they shaped the show into). Not long after this show I found my way to their other stuff, in particular Blue Lines, which was a sufficiently superior work, so it’s good I didn’t know “Unfinished Sympathy” at the time, since even “Teardrop” wouldn’t have been enough of a substitute. An electronic act doing a whole album might not have been the same challenge as a live band, since they could replicate any sound they recorded with something canned, which a band couldn't necessarily pull off, including vocalists, so having the originals there was superfluous but a nice touch (and surely got them out of the house if they needed that). On the screen beyond they had some great visuals that referred to a paranoid conspiracy thing like what helped define the ‘90s, so it was either stuck in that era or very forward-thinking (and anticipating or following nostalgia for that decade), but they had the right to make the reference, having helped define a sub-sub-genre of music with this album (at least somewhere in the world). Even the guys eschewing any banter or acknowledging any of the world around them was a chilly reference, cold enough to be cool, and in keeping with electronic acts who let the computers do the performing, but their presence such a minimal amount of humanity that it would be welcome, when all this performance could be canned and they might be up on stage checking their e-mail. But if only for the music and the visual throw-back it made for a night out and an appreciation of a seminal work (and gateway to more), even if Carla & I wouldn’t be allowed to replicate those special moments in public.

Massive Attack set-list:
“I Found a Reason“ (The Velvet Underground cover)
“Risingson“
“10:15 Saturday Night“ (The Cure cover)
“Man Next Door“ (John Holt cover) (with Horace Andy)
“Black Milk“ (with Elizabeth Fraser)
“Mezzanine“
“Bela Lugosi's Dead“ (Bauhaus cover)
“Exchange“
“See a Man's Face“ (Horace Andy cover)
“Dissolved Girl“
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?“ (Pete Seeger cover)
“Inertia Creeps“
“Rockwrok“ (Ultravox cover)
“Angel“ (with Horace Andy)
“Teardrop“ (with Elizabeth Fraser)
“Levels“ (Avicii cover)
“Group Four“ (with Elizabeth Fraser)