Acid Mothers

[ateolf]

Mary Beth and I went to see Acid Mothers Temple at the Hi Tone at night. It was a pretty ruling show. Delta Stardust opened and they were pretty bad, hippieish bar rock with attempts at humor songs. Next was Spirit Mother who was on tour with Acid Mothers Temple. They were better than I may have been expecting with a name with Spirit Mother, but that's not saying a whole lot. Generally, they were pretty straight hard rock that's a little bit on the heavy side. At first they seemed to have a very slightly spacey sound, but they seemed to settle more towards classic rock as the set went on. The singer (and the music in general) sounded a good bit like Soundgarden (without the shrieking, just the lower vocals register). Overall they were pretty mediocre. Now enough of that, because Acid Mothers Temple ruled. They played a really long set too, probably something around an hour and a half. Makoto's guitar was just blistering. I remember when I saw them before many years ago, I mentioned how Hiroshi's synth playing was just a lot of high resonance filter sweeps. Well, this time I realized he actually only plays the filter, never touches the keyboard, no oscillators just pure filter resonance. The drummer was pretty crazy playing his ass off, but I didn't see him too much because he was mostly behind Hiroshi from where I was standing. The band seemed pretty frustrated with the sound guy. The vocal mic fed back a good bit and the vocalist was annoyed. At a point there was no synth in the mix and so Hiroshi was looking super frustrated. Weird low hums would just come in at times. The second to last song ended with a cappella vocals and the mic was just feeding back away until the vocalist finally just unplugged the mic and sang the rest into the room. The last song was instrumental so it just stayed unplugged. And that last song was like at least thirty minutes. It would start off slow with this repetitive guitar arpeggio and then speed up and get loud and noisy and then back to the slow and quiet and it repeated that whole thing a few times. Where you're like, ah this is definitely over now. And then it started back all over again. It ruled! And at the very end, Makoto was doing crazier things with his guitar and then did the thing where he brought it out in the audience for people to play. So I was standing right in front of him and I was the first one. He came to the front of the stage and held the guitar out and then beckoned me. So I'm all hitting his guitar and it ruled. Then he moved around for other people to play it. Since I was standing right there the whole time, during the brief pauses while someone else was coming towards it, I was able to get a few extra hits on it. The only negative thing is that Mary Beth started feeling sick during the show and had to go out to the car to lie down before it was over. She'd thought she wouldn't miss much but they played a good bit longer than expected, still she saw at least half of it. Hit the merch table afterwards and got a t-shirt and a few cds: Mainliner: Live in Tokyo 2014; Kawabata Makoto/Michishita Shinsuke: Sex, Voyage, and Echo Chamber; and Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O.: Shall We Return to Outer Space?