The Starlight Ballroom was designed for dancing. As you walk into the place, a disco ball throws deceiving patterns of colored light on the wide dance floor, informing you that you didn't come here to stand still. Holy Fuck reinforced this unwritten house rule on Saturday, providing a small crowd of roughly 100 people with 50 minutes of concentrated intensity before surrendering the stage to headliners Super Furry Animals.
With the audience slow to arrive, the Toronto-based electronica/rock group hesitated to take the stage until two particularly enthusiastic fans screamed "Holy Fuck!" Then they knew it was time.
"Audience participation is really important," said band co-founder Brian Borcherdt. "There's something about having that other entity there. a natural and intuitive flow of energy."
He and fellow co-founder Graham Walsh made their appreciation of the audience abundantly clear; every few minutes, both would look up from their keyboards and smile at the throbbing mass of dancing fans.
From the start of the show, Borcherdt, Walsh and the band's bassist, Mike Bigelow, were huddled over their respective instruments, bobbing in time with the music. The dual frontmen, with their toy keyboards, "grown-up" keyboards and even a lap steel guitar (played like a violin, but with a butter knife for a bow), looked like mad scientists on stage, tweaking knobs on their effects processors, playing short melodies on their keyboards and screaming into microphones to enhance each song to perfection.
Holy Fuck's plethora of instruments created a profusion of noises and sounds (yes, there's a difference) that carried them and their audience on an ethereal journey from the hypnotic fury of "The Pulse" to the electronic anthem that is "Lovely Allen," stopping along the way to get down to the extra-groovy numbers "Royal Gregory" and "Frenchy's."
Every track on Holy Fuck's October 2007 release, LP, truly comes alive in concert. Though the album - which portrays the band as a more energetic, less neurotic version of Radiohead (sans vocals or traditional guitar-playing) - was recorded live (meaning all four members of the band recorded their parts at the same time for each song), some tracks, such as "Echo Sam," fall flat in the studio. On stage, however, the bass lines resonate in every listener's chest and the tempos are dropped, giving each song a new depth. "Milkshake" - the second track on both the album and the set list on Saturday night - got bodies going. And everybody moved, even the lone parent in the room.
Recommended tracks: "Royal Gregory," "Super Inuit," "Lovely Allen"
Sounds like: Radiohead on speed or Mute Math without vocals.
