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SXSW Review: Suuns at Red 7
If you want to talk about a band that sounds completely different on record than they do live, talk about Montreal’s Suuns. When the band hit the indoor stage at Red 7 around 8 p.m. on Wednesday, any audience members familiar with the band’s work on last year’s “Zeroes QC” were probably prepared for the sly and foreboding minimalist dance grooves - infused with the occasional distorted wail - that the album contains.
What they got instead was an abrasive assault of face-shaking bass and searing distortion. And for a while, it worked. The set opener was a noise rock march driven by the steady slam of a snare drum. There were no chord changes - just jutting synth and feedback, which set up a tantalizing tension. And the band delivered on that tension later in the performance when they switched from straight ahead rhythms to an eviscerating, triple-time grindcore thrash.
But really, that’s when it became clear that something was wrong. The band was four songs into the set, and yet it was impossible to tell what they were playing. Were the vocals abnormally low in the mix on purpose, and was there some sort of pitch-shifting effect on them, or were they just distorted by the solid wall of surrounding noise? Were most of the songs really chugging through minutes-long stretches without chord changes, or was it, again, just a side effect of all the indiscernible noise? Was the boom of the drum machine really supposed to dominate almost everything else the band was playing?
Maybe it was the mix, or maybe the young band just hasn’t taken the time to sort out their live dynamic yet. Or, more likely, maybe it was a bit of both. Whatever the case, the tasteful restraint of Suuns on record was nowhere to be found at Red 7.
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