Tough Customer // Wire

We Are Wolves

I don’t know if it’s the proliferation of cheap recording technology or the fact that Guitar Center is always having crazy, once-in-a-lifetime blow out sales, but for some reason everybody and their mother thinks they should be in a band these days. This is all well and good when the wanna-be Coldplays and the would-be Limp Bizkits keep their ill-fated dreams locked up in a practice studio somewhere. That way the public’s ears are safe and none of us ever have to be subjected to their self delusion and extra shitty music.

The thing is, most of these bands insist on playing live. (The rest of them send me CDs). By way of either luck or tenacity they end up opening for bands that are much better than them. Allow me to address these cut rate opening bands for a moment: Do not do this. I understand you have dreams of rock stardom, but it is simply not in the cards for you. When your lame-ass, no talent band gets up on stage and sucks at full volume, it only makes you look bad. And it makes the band you’re opening for look that much better.

Case in point: I went to see We Are Wolves last night at Cafe Du Nord. There were two opening bands. One of them dressed like a group of drug-addled Burning Man cast-offs and played psychedelic electro dance rock. They were ok. At the very least they got the early crowd dancing and they seemed to be either really enjoying themselves or really high on peyote.

It was the band that came on next that was the problem. They were god awful. The drummer was off time, the guitar player just made noise, and the singer couldn’t sing - although from the look on his face you would have thought he was a finalist on American Idol. By the time they lurched into their second song the whole audience had escaped to the bar in the front room, leaving behind three people near the stage that were clearly relatives.

Why keep playing at that point? If you can’t even make music mediocre enough for people to ignore, if your music literally repels them, why not just give up? Do you think a surgeon would keep cutting people open if everyone he touched died on the operating table? Do you think a race car driver would keep getting behind the wheel if his cars blew up as soon as he crossed the starting line? No, they would not. So why do you insist on playing music when it is so clearly not meant to be?

Really the only acceptable answer is this: The incredibly terrible band whose name I didn’t even bother to look up was there just to make We Are Wolves sound awesome by contrast. If that’s the case, then congratulations on a job well done. When WAW hit the stage and began cranking out their trademark brand of electro-punk, it was like drinking a cool milkshake after 45 minutes of hot shit sandwiches. The crowd came streaming back into the room, twice as large as it was before. Everybody danced and drank. WAW didn’t waste any time with mumbled banter in between songs. They just turned their amps up and rocked like it was meant to be.

MP3: ‘Fight And Kiss’

MP3: ‘Coconut 155′