She Wants Revenge

At the Commodore Ballroom, on Tuesday, June 17

Something bad happened at the Commodore on Tuesday night, but nobody’s talking. There was already an unsettled feel to the room when Britain’s Switches played to the dozen or so people who actually made it for the 8 p.m. start time of this stop on the Nylon Summer Music Tour. The second band, New York City’s the Virgins, seemed ill-equipped to change the pervasively disconnected mood. Perhaps it had something to do with the side-stage video presentation, Nylon TV, which featured shots of the Kills frolicking in London, Hot Hot Heat fart-arsing about in the Big Apple, and any number of other half-baked fashion models and self-appointed celebrities enjoying the international good life in high-definition video. The message? Well, aside from the obvious—buy Guess Jeans!—it seemed to be saying that your tiny life sucks in comparison.

So, in this context, it’s probably churlish to complain about the Virgins’ somnambulate performance. As po-faced frontman Donald Cummings morosely said: “I noticed it was raining here today. Then I noticed it was cold.” This came after he mistook Vancouver for Toronto, and long before the band finally found its feet for the white boy, indie-rock funk of “Rich Girls”.

True to the apparently Herculean debauchery its members bragged about in the Straight last week, Nashville’s Be Your Own Pet appeared haggard and bewildered once it hit the stage. Oddly enough, this geared it up into the kind of go-for-broke performance that legends are built upon: the quartet was an electrifying and spastic celebration of hitting hard and fast, with twitchy singer Jemina Pearl flanked by scissor-kicking sidemen while she approximated a 30-minute seizure. After six almost impossible-to-discern songs (“Fill My Pill” was the opener, possibly, and “Heart Throb” was in there), the mesmerizingly unhinged Pearl and the boys got it together for “Food Fight!”, “Becky”, and “The Kelly Affair”.

Introducing the last song, “Bunk Trunk Skunk”, Pearl said flatly, “We’re never coming back, so fuck all of you. Really. I can say that. Go fuck yourselves.” Was she kidding? Good question, but the band was absent from the merch table afterwards. Roadie Maxwell Peebles cagily revealed that Pearl had smashed the glass door to the backstage shower, and might have been kicked out of the club postperformance for her troubles. The Commodore management politely declined to say.

Whatever occurred, it sure juiced an otherwise deadly boring night of advertising-driven, pseudo high jinks. And headliners She Wants Revenge sure as shit brought us all down again. The sloppy comparisons to Joy Division must stop; the Los Angeles two-piece, augmented by drummer Scott Ellis and guitarist Thomas Froggatt, is more akin to Soft Cell minus the fun, or new romantic fops like Vancouver’s own Images in Vogue, especially given frontman Justin Warfield’s irritating, quasi-British intonation.

Save for a certain discordant majesty to “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not”, it was an abominable set, emblematized by the Barack Obama posters pinned to the amps. Like its favoured presidential candidate, She Wants Revenge was vaguely hypnotic at best, nominally stylish, and utterly devoid of meaning or substance.