live capsule markets

By anders pearson 21 Nov 2002

lani flew up to new york last night and then flew back to DC early this morning.

why would she do something like that?

to catch one of the <a href=”http://www.madcapsulemarkets.com/“>Mad Capsule Markets</a>’ four US shows of course.

the MCM’s are a japanese band who describe their sound as ‘digi-punk hardcore’. imagine something between fear factory and atari teenage riot with some surf and hip hop influences thrown in for good measure. then wrap that all up with super hi tech japanese video game aesthetics.

anyway, <a href=”http://www.giantrobot.com/“>giant robot</a> sponsored them on a limited tour of the US. by limited i mean 2 shows on the east coast and 2 shows on the west coast.

we caught the one at <a href=”http://www.northsix.com/“>north 6</a> out in williamsburg. lani was excited because the bar there had <abbrev title=”Pabst Blue Ribbon”>PBR</a> in cans. the crowd was pretty small but fairly lively for a new york crowd. the small size of the crowd was a little disappointing when you consider how good the music is but isn’t really surprising since they haven’t exactly gotten much airplay in the states.

the opening band, ‘the screw’ was strange and not really what you’d expect to see opening for the MCM’s. they were wearing weird homemade alien costumes. when they started their set, they warned the crowd “we just got out of art school and are very pretentious”. their music sounded like some kind of bizarre cross between the muppets and souxsie and the banshees. but they were funny so it was tolerable.

the Mad Capsule Markets were fantastic. very energetic and aggressive live. the sound was pretty good too. loud enough for a heavy band but not so loud that it gets distorted. about the only complaint that i could make would be that they pretty much just played their album OSC-DIS straight through. they only had two or three new (or maybe old. i’ve only heard OSC-DIS) songs.

the vocalist doesn’t speak much english so he had all his stage banter written down ahead of time on a piece of paper in his pocket. so between songs, he’d stop pull out the paper concentrate real hard and read off something like “yeah. how yall doing? yeah. it’s great to be here. yeah. you guys have been great. yeah. next we’re going to play a chillout song. yeah. a chillout song.”. it was hilarious. the bassist had a shirt that just said ‘METAL’ across the front. i need to get one of those.

Tags: mad capsule markets