!!!

I had a great pic of this guy doing his best Travolta, but it is blurry. This pic is from here.

The story of my first !!! experience is one of my favorites to tell, though barely related to !!!. (For the benefit of at least one brilliant reader—my dad—I’ll deign to mention that !!! is a band, not just a Spell Check-confusing sentence interruption. The exclamation points are meant to summon “any three consecutive sounds,” the most popular pronunciation being “Chk Chk Chk.”) The experience of that moment in time—it was Labor Day, 2002—outweighed my first experience of the band a million to one. But that the band was there at all, with me—with everyone—remains significant.

It was my first trip to New York City. I traveled alone; I think my family came to meet me after a few days of duo-nomadic exploration. I just derived the term “duo-nomadic” to describe how, until my family arrived, my only compass was one Mr. Jordan Bass. I believe Mr. Bass was, at that time, a Yale sophomore—a Bulldog, as it were. Regardless of his class, he was far more interested in two-hour-train-rides-begetting-endless-adventure-in-NYC than his curriculum. Mr. Bass met me at Penn Station, that booming gateway to the separate dimension that is Manhattan. We trained to Brooklyn where Black Dice played to a small crowd. Both tired from travel, we yawned through the weirdness and left early, back to Manhattan’s upper west side. The next day would do us in.

That mild September must have been minutes before—or seconds after, I can’t remember—“Brooklyn” became a dirty word for a significant musical moment. Brooklyn’s cheap, productive, and attractive artists were blooming through the brick cracks. Warehouses were show spaces; tenements became studios and coffee shops and vintage boutiques and eateries; there was a “free” store, where everything was free. The whole area seemed dosed with peace and lawlessness. Stencil artists covered their sidewalks with ideas. I have a photo of one sidewalk square depicting a stack of money transforming into a flock of birds, escaping in spray paint at my feet. The stenciled caption reads: “Give away your nest egg.” Everything was incredible.

The Saturday after I arrived, Brooklyn—Williamsburg specifically—was proud host to overlapping “block party’s.” One party took place in an abandoned lot at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge. There was no solid footing to speak of, just weeds grown tall in debris from whatever history collapsed there. Revelers crowded along the Bridge and the surrounding rooftops. Orthodox Jewish children stood on the decks of a towering brick building across the street, curious as to why the Yeah Yeah Yeahs didn’t observe the Sabbath. Four or five bands played this party—I must have missed a couple, but remember enjoying Oneida and Liars, when Liars still sounded like it could take credit for the dance rock revival. And, of course, there was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the most enormous little band in the country at the time. This was maybe a year before “Maps” made you cry and hug your significant other a little tighter. People were onto the YYYs; MTV’s Gideon Yago stood side stage with a camcorder during the set. It was four in the afternoon.

Eight blocks away—south, I think—was another party. For those who’ve smiled through Dave Chappelle’s “Block Party” film, this second party took place in what easily could have been the same huge, brick alley Chappelle used. Of course the lineup Chappelle curated was vastly different from what Mr. Bass and I saw; instead of good hip hop and R&B, there was good noise and dance rock. The party featured a dozen or more bands on a stage and the ground in front of the stage. The earliest acts (Andrew W.K. was one of them) overlapped with the hyped (and free) YYY show down the street. Mr. Bass and I trekked back and forth a few times. But after the YYY ended, we found a meal and a spot in the alley and waited patiently for Lightning Bolt to change our lives.

Before Lightning Bolt could do that, we sat through Les Savy Fav and—back to back—!!!. I didn’t connect with these bands that day; I’d landed 30 hours ago, slept on a couch, and already seen 20 other bands. I’m making excuses for my five-year-old tastes, which would be less necessary if I didn’t like those bands so much now that I feel ashamed of myself then. But to my credit, patience and openmindedness prevailed, albeit many years later. LSF would win me over at the Fillmore in San Francisco when the crazy singer roped 1,000 people with a hundreds-of-feet-long microphone cable. !!! would win me over a few years later when I realized the band is incredible.

Seriously: incredible. This band cares more about the synthesis of performance, physical interaction, and recording than anyone else I’ve heard in the genre. I’d love to make a late night advertisement for !!!:

“Is your dance music making you yawn? Does Bloc Party sound to careful? Do New Order and Depeche Mode sound too precise and too imitated? Do The Faint and Interpol sound like New Order and Depeche Mode with more advanced recording qualities? If so, you should try out listening to !!!. It’s just the right distance outside of the box and a real groovy time all around. The band wants you to feel a part of the experience of the band wanting to experience you. Together!”

I know, it would be the coolest late night ad out there, especially if it was themed "Day-Glo.” You might not understand how sure I am of this until you check out the personalities exhibited in this Youtube:



Firstly, you’ve got 8,000+ Europeans partying like the war is over. Then you’ve got the ultimate rhythm section, rock solid and loving it. (The bassist tours with LCD Soundsystem—he must be good!) Then you’ve got this guitarist who records the band (in NYC and Sacramento, where !!! began). There’s also this guest vocalist who turns up on the bands new album, Myth Takes, and this guy has some serious boho soul. Like nine minutes into the Youtube he’s in the crowd singing “I know you want more; I know you need more.” He’s down, man! Then you’ve got Nic Offer, !!!’s ringleader who acts like he’s the lead in first-time-director-David Lee Roth’s remake of “Saturday Night Fever.” Offer has space-age dance moves (those hips don’t lie). He’s the commander in chief of !!!. Watch that Youtube again: he covers every inch of both stages, chants gibberish for two minutes, and simulates sex atop a stack of speakers. Jesus.

Jesus is actually a pretty strong cross reference for !!!, something that Wikipedia fails to mention. Since critics have claimed every available scriptural adjective to mis-describe Arcade Fire, I’m not going to sweat calling !!! “transcendent.” The perfect !!! music video would have the band grooving on the surface of the ocean surrounded by a nation of party-goers and lots of flying fish and friendly dolphins. That same video would hopefully just be a live take of Myth Takes in its entirety; every song is a potent variable. There are some predictable funk-trances, some pop-gems, a “shuffle,” a rap or two, and plenty of experimentation, most of which is percussive. I’d be remiss to not mention that our drummer Mr. Noah Scott Clark—leaping forward with his quest for the ’07 MVP—composed some marching-style snare work for two of the tracks, including the single “All My Heroes Are Weirdos” (brilliant MP3 below).

None of this changes the fact that my favorite song on the record has no percussion. It’s this song “Infinifold” (brilliant MP3 below), which is a ballad of sorts. It’s beautiful. If I had $20,000 and a better Rolodex I’d commission the DFA remix myself just so I could enjoy this song in the club. Since I can’t do that, but immodestly recognize the ingenuity of the idea, I decided to throw down a beat myself (using Garageband and Cubase, if you really want to know). I had this thought the first time I heard this track; I had to remix it. So I spent a week on this little groove. The MP3 is below. “Infinifold” becomes “Fierce Infinifold.”

Even though my first !!! live experience as a dyed-in-the-wool fan will come in four weeks (be there), I’m happy that the band was part of that life-affirming moment I had in NYC. The rest of my Labor Day ’02 story hinges on the primal insanity of Lightning Bolt. I’ll finish that tale in a week.


Click to download “All My Heroes Are Weirdos” by !!! from the album Myth Takes.


Click to download “Infinifold” by !!! from the album Myth Takes.


Click to download “FIERCE Infinifold,” re-dubbed by yours truly.



!!!’s WEBSITE.
!!! on MYSPACE.
!!! on LAST.FM.
!!! on WIKIPEDIA.
!!! on HYPEMACHINE.
!!! on ELBO.WS.
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