LimeWire Music Blog

Well, they didn’t play “Hot On The Heels Of Love.” And after about 45 minutes of building toward the epic crescendo of “Discipline,” they broke their momentum for an extended noise experiment with something called a gritstleizer. Nonetheless, last night’s Throbbing Gristle performance was a brutal and entertaining display of gut-busting noise.

This was the band’s third night in town after two hit-or-miss shows, a brief tour, and a Coachella set.  The experience seems to have done them some good.  Transgendered front person Genesis P-Orridge commanded attention with contorted scowls and wry banter, while the rest of the group occupied themselves with laptops, a fretless guitar, and other unidentifiable electronic equipment.  TG play with the lights on, which is uncomfortable —  it’s like seeing your date in the daytime for the first time — but added a kind of plain sight drama, as if they wanted the audience to see them for all their scabs and scars.  A contrived light show would have distracted us from the group’s power, anyway.  They began the set with slowly, with a track that leaned closer to the drone of opener Emeralds, piling electronic beats on top of bass that perpetually reverberated through my ribs as they built towards their industrial-dance climax, hitting touchstones like “Hamburger Lady” and “What A Day!” on the way.  TG were like shamans invoking the darkest industrial demons, which in this case were goth oldies, metal dudes with weird beards, and people in masks.

images by Ben Gold