Event Eagles of Death Metal • The Distillers
City Los Angeles
State California
Venue Henry Fonda Theatre
Date April 26, 2004
What happens when you mix one garishly painted, Spanish Colonial-style Hollywood landmark, a record setting heatwave and the manic, guerrilla grind of the Distillers? Aside from a drenched in sweat, too close to your neighbor cattle call and an architectural sense of history, you experience something unique, something rare. A pure revelatory vibe.
Celebrating their third album Coral Fang, The Distillers’ Brody Dalle stomps onstage at The Fonda and fires into their April 26th set by figuratively kicking the audience in the teeth with her ravaged, buzzsaw display of vocal tendencies. Throughout the night, the Australian native shotguns the audience with a mishmash of old and new. From Coral’s pointed “Gallow is God” and “Die on a Rope” to their second album’s warning of apocryphal excess, “City of Angels”, the band doesn’t let up until the final notes of a downright fear inducing “Drain the Blood” encore. Regardless of the aforementioned heat, the audience mosh themselves into a frenzy, while the Distillers segue from song to song led by Dalle and Tony Bradley’s chord-driven charge. But don’t for once think that the band is just one stamping rapid-fire note after another. Dalle’s “Beat Your Heart Out” alone exudes an ethereal-earthy struggle that lesser bands can only dream of.
To watch, no, scratch that, to FEEL the Distillers perform at The Fonda is akin to having a raw, nail-studded, emotional baseball bat crack open your skull while you’re calmly waiting in prayer. You take a moment and glance at the classical architecture and elegance of the building, then are immediately wrenched back into whatever jackhammer fervor the music has induced. That’s when you notice the cryptic mannequin hands and mirrors hanging from the ceiling and you realize that it’s the Distillers’ raw, blunt edginess that stands in contrast to the ultimately surreal surroundings. But like some twisted nightmare involving a cage match between Barney Fife and a bucket full of razor blades and dynamite- one’s a comforting old friend, the other’s a dangerous scenario- the mind has a way of making the two work together. And at this moment, you couldn’t imagine having one without the other. The Distillers OWN this place.
Also having received their invite to this shindig were the Eagles of Death Metal. The Jesse Hughes led band opened the night and set the tone for the entire experience. Aiding the handlebar mustached leader of the pack were drummer Carlo Von Sexron (aka QOTSA’s Josh Homme) and Millionaire’s pretzel-boned frontman, Tim Vanhamel, whose own onstage antics begged the question “How can someone contort and leap so much and STILL play this good?” Listening to EODM bridge the spectrum from the funky “Wastin’ My Time”, to the smooth and poppy “So Easy”, you can tell that Hughes refuses to let the band be pigeonholed as mere side projects of his well-known bandmates. Instead, we get a result that’s sometimes comedic, sometimes emotional and more often than not, pounding and deliberate. If it’s one thing the EODM did well, it’s that they succeeded in igniting the crowd for the Distillers’ onslaught.
To both bands’ credit, while drastically different, they each knew what they had to do and they did it well. As a result, whatever anarchistic vibe the audience threw off, both bands embraced it and the audience was left feeling like they had not only seen a great show, but that they had just witnessed some penultimate end-of-the-world party with no one holding back.
Then again, it may just be heatstroke.
Music
Film & TV
