Concert Review: Oliver Future with Casxio and Radars to the Sky @ the Echoplex (5.23.08)

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By Travis Woods

Though I thought this month’s Let’s Independent! was a fairly diverse collage of L.A. indie rock, just three nights later I was lost in the most eclectic evening of local music in recent memory. Friday night’s show at the Echoplex—featuring Oliver Future’s epic, ringing soundscapes and gnarled psychedelic rock, the hipgrip throb of Casxio’s dance-rock funk, and the intricate, catchy thrash of Radars to the Sky—was a volatile, whiplashed cross-section of genre detours and musical exploration, gliding like mercury from one sonic edge to another before disappearing into Oliver Future’s mushroom cloud of pulsing rock.

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Without their usual horn accompaniment, Radars to the Sky played a stripped-down set of fast and loose rock ‘n roll—while this lessened the complexity of their more complicated song arrangements (exception: the knotty kinetics of “You Take It To Heart”’s multipart structure, a song that moved from a charming and melodic intro to an unhinged climax of desperate howls and pummeling drums), it allowed for newer, less tested songs to emerge from the shadows of older tracks and galvanize in ways that are occasionally lessened by the spiraling, dynamic journeys of songs like “Zurich 1958” and “I Might.”

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“Nine Months,” with keyboardist Kate Spitser on lead vocals, mixed her sweetly whispered voice with looping arcs of jittery synth lines and subdued rhythms; “Sink My Teeth” was a frenetic, lashing snarl of punk noise and rage; and the serrated-riff barrage of “Selfish Kids”’s rollercoaster dynamics moved from pounding hard rock to the shimmering, carnivalesque keyboard breakdowns at the song’s center, becoming the showstopping centerpiece of the Radars set, and one of the evening’s highlights overall.

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Casxio’s set was a hyper-amalgam of cold postpunk guitar precision crisscrossed with the decidedly warm falsetto howls and mad glossolalic basslines of unabashed funk. Theirs is the sound of dance-floor sex under the stinging houselights of David Byrne-styled paranoia and polyrhythms—imagine Beck’s “Debra” gone tantric and stretched into a forty-minute sheet of handsy new wave.

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A live-wire jolt of dance-inflected rock, Casxio’s stomping disco ‘n roll is one of the most refreshing iterations of a genre near-dead from incessant scavenging—with the startling blasts of songcraft and enthusiasm of songs like “Seventeen” or “My Book,” the band transcended pastiche and reminded the audience that it’s ok to do more than headbob at a rock show.

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At the evening’s end, Oliver Future detonated a set of ambitious, Herculean rock—their epic, guitar-fueled performance stretched well beyond an hour as they melded the bombastic nova of hard rock with the luscious, eerie nebulae of twisting, noise-tinted balladry into a bruising collapse of apocalyptic rock. Frontman Noah Lit lead the audience through his swirling vistas of crumbling interpersonal landscapes and emotional tripwires as the band lit the way with the controlled chaos of their turbulent, shapeshifting aural explosions. Tearing through everything from soul to shoegaze to Beatles-styled pop, Oliver Future crafted a suite-like set that not only mirrored the eclectica of what came before it, but internalized the music before releasing it as a Jackson Pollack’d eruption of searing rock ‘n roll that left ear-haunting echoes long after they left the stage.

May 27, 2008 | Filed Under Concert Reviews, Exclusive Features 

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