Which is by no means to say that it was bad

Holy fuck! Ruins! So good!  Tatsuya Yoshida is awesomeness wearing glasses! Things:

• Many people were moving their heads and bodies as if they were following the rhythm (which, to be fair, some were, but not for very long).  What was going on in their heads? They were obviously really into it, but in a way that didn't require them to notice that they were not synching with the music at all.
• There was a lot more melody than I expected, which in this context isn't saying a whole lot—you have to take what melody is given you, after all.  But it still surprised me, perhaps because I only have one Ruins album.
• For most of the show it was just Yoshida drumming and singing along with a bass track, since the bassist quit.  First, it was amazing that he was able to keep up the frenetic drumming and sing clearly and go from falsetto to singing deeply, etc; second, although I feared that him playing along to a recording would be teh lame, it was actually still quite cool (possibly because Ruins pieces in general don't allow for much flexibility—or do they?), especially since there was just enough time between the tracks for him to hurriedly say "thank you" immediately after one ended and then, with maybe a second of applause intervening, start up again.
• I think, though I cannot be sure, they played two medleys, once with the bass track and once with the Chicagoan guest bassist: the Classical medley (I only think this because during the piece Yoshida played a recognizable, straightforward martial rhythm on the snare, and then later there was a clear quotation from Marche Slav), and the Hard Rock medley (because of a riff from "Black Dog").  I can't be sure, though, because I only really recognized the noted bits.
• The bassist (Jonathan Hischke, former Flying Luttenbacher and current touring member of Hella, and who also played bass for Yowie in their opening set to replace a missing guitarist, which didn't work out quite so well, since one of the things about Yowie is that they play with two guitars tuned a quarter tone apart, and that doesn't translate so well to one guitar and one bass) was awesome; he didn't seem to know the names of the songs he had learned so he'd just play a very brief bit from them when Yoshida wanted to know what to play next, and that very brief bit sufficed, to my amazement, to uniquely identify it.  Once, he played a bit, and Yoshida asked him, "Warrido?" (one of the few tracks I recognized, and the middle of which featured an improvised section), and he just shrugged.

Comments

[fan]

actually, that show yowie played with 2 basses.

[ben wolfson]

I'm pretty sure I witnessed them playing with a bass and a guitar.