RRIICCEE show last night

So I no longer have any drive to go see bands perform live. The one or two shows I force myself to attend yearly always leave me questioning my intentions about ten minutes after arriving at the bar. Maybe I’m getting less patient with my age but I can’t stand it when bands don’t start playing until three+ hours after doors open. On a work night that just sucks.

But really, I can live with all that if the band is amazing and puts on a mind blowing performance (something that has yet to happen as of late). So when I heard that Vincent Gallo was going to actually play Buffalo at Soundlab, a city that he always rips on in interviews — I was excited to purchase my ticket and go.

Gallo was bringing along some guy from Hole and a few other musicians to play “music” as the band RRIICCEE. They don’t believe in recording albums in a studio and then playing those songs to an audience in some rehearsed manner. Instead they just play and feed of each other giving a unique performance every time. This sounded like it was going to be some sort of noise, jamming, jazz, free form borefest, but I didn’t care since I wanted to see Gallo act like the persona I’ve come to admire — an asshole with great taste!

For $20 I can honestly say it wasn’t worth it. The music RRIICCEE played was good and the type I generally enjoy, but not something I really wanted to see live. The last thing I wanted to do on a Tuesday night was stand in a packed bar and stare at the floor because I was so bored. Not sure what was wrong with me because that used to be my scene a few years back. Hmmm…

Most of the songs had Gallo noodling away on the bass guitar, while Erlandson did some noise with guitar pedals (I think), followed with an occasional drum buildup that went nowhere. A few of the songs had Gallo singing softly similar to his solo stuff on When and these were easily my favorites. But the rest of the noise was forgettable and yawn inducing.

If I could have found a spot at the bar, the show might have been more enjoyable. Technically they were fine, I just wasn’t feeling the lack of song structure last night. But hey — maybe that’s your sort of thing and you’ll absolutely love their live performance. Worth noting, Gallo seemed like a really nice guy which I wasn’t expecting. He was smiling the entire show and he’d just laugh to himself when people shouted stuff like “Welcome home Billy Brown.” If I had the energy to have stayed around after I might have gotten a photograph with him. Oh well.