Animental

I leaned against a pole in the center of the room. I leaned so hard that I thought for a moment, "what if it bends and breaks in two and everything falls in, on top of this strange and alarming and terribly captivating performance?" I turned to Daniel, standing beside me. He turned his eyes to mine and we smiled. In front of us were three girls in subtly tie dyed dresses and feathered caps. They flapped their sleeves and bent to the ground. They wound around in circles and leaned into the audience and back into each other, cawing and cooing of the end of their futuristic world all the while. When they finally crept up on stage and picked up their instruments, the music was a lifetime of discord. The drummer held her hands high in the air and dropped them suddenly and deliberately, beating with dramatic, stilted action. The turn into this low, deep metal, slow and dying, I leaned harder into the pole beside me, eyes aflame, mouth agape, smile perking the corners. The ladies from Animental then dropped their instruments and grabbing their microphones, crept off of the front of the stage. A beat track jumped from the speakers and the three started to gyrate and dance, rhyming through crackling microphones... After it was over, this guy turned to me, eyes staring into the distance with a bit of disbelief. "It was like thirty years of music packed into what? Forty-five minutes?" I couldn't get the image out of my head, the fluttering sleeves and the awkward turning turning turning....the drummers heavy handed beats, the quiet caw-caws in otherwise silent moments...

bizarre and wonderful.

SHOW LISTING

Animental
buzzard (we're a country band, and we like to play for country folk.)
the Celebs (This is a song about laser boobs, it's called "Laser Boobs")
No-Kachina -- incredible experiments of sound and atmosphere
Ben Martin DJing..
@the Hot L Birmingham, June 13th

Here are some great shots of an Animental show in Toronto (2004)