Business Trip: Blackout Holiday at The Knitting Factory Tap Bar, 3/9/06

I always wonder when the turn comes where seeing live music becomes an occasion instead of a way of life. Generations of music lovers have made the same claim: We will forever enjoy sucking down Magic Hat in a basement bar while banging our heads to killer drum beats. And then along come fourteen-hour-days, endless errands, infectious and corrosive television addictions. All of a sudden you’re at the Knitting Room Tap Bar in a room full of suits and it’s been two years since you saw U2 at The Garden, four years since you’ve worshipped at the altar of “standing room only” and about five years since you’ve really lived, god damn it! Make my return to this sound-filled cavern count. Suck me backwards through the timeline. Shake the walls of my structured world and make me feel alive!

Good thing Blackout Holiday’s got chops. A combination of contagious melodies and painstaking polish, the band proved at their Knitting Factory show last night that they can ride the precarious line between wound tight and wound out. It is difficult to finesse roughness without sacrificing raw edge, but Blackout Holiday laces up and lashes out in all the right places. Rich’s voice is slick, a surprisingly soothing salve over the booming drum crashes and silvery riffs. Although the bands plucks more from early nineties grunge and arena rock than eighties new wave, Rich’s voice leads to The Stone Roses and Morrissey like the inescapable familiarity of an ex-girlfriend’s perfume. The bass lines are clean, fast and bold, standout enough to catch the ear of an amateur listener and perfectly synched with the companion thrashing and crashing. If anything this band is well rehearsed. But the real story of this band is in the drummer, Charles Palmer, trader-by-day, musician by night, and the party responsible for the unusual outpouring of suited, shiny-shoed support.

Palmer is an ogre on the skins. He rips through songs, tears into them with vicious teeth, sets a voracious pace with his ferocious, deliberate chomps. Palmer recently subbed in R&B quintet Damsel & Fly, showcasing his ease and comfort behind the barrels and demonstrating amazing proficiency and adaptability after minimal rehearsal time with silken-voiced Jasmine Jamillah and her soul-funk crew. But although the man is all soul – more groove than crash, more jah than g-d of rock - Palmer was built for caveman pounding. Fierce, but meticulously organized, the drummer’s reverence for experimental rhythmic organization is evident. The last song in the set was an especially acute sample of the drummer’s innovation, with Palmer leaning heavily on the left side of his kit, eyes closed, shooting calculated magic out his wands.

The beat connects the band to the earth. Watching the gravel fly, businessmen are brought back to simpler days.