A band with a lot of hype, though I've been steered away. They're coming to DC soon, so thought this might be of interest to someone...
April 6, 2004
MUSIC REVIEW | THE DISTILLERS
In Double Time, Sex and Death and Punk 'n' Roll
By KELEFA SANNEH
Here's a great idea for a band: a bunch of loud, fast punks, led by a roaring Australian woman who's never seen in public without blood-red lipstick and a carefully ripped T-shirt.
This band exists, and it has a name: the Distillers. On Sunday night the group came to Bowery Ballroom to bash out a set full of raucous, bleary rants.
But here's the problem. The roaring Australian, Brody Dalle, was fierce enough, but her performance was also predictable and, by the end, a bit tedious. All night long she stuck to the script, pushing her way through double-speed tantrums, plodding ballads and fist-waving choruses; if the narrowness of this role made her feel restless, she never let on.
Subtlety isn't this band's specialty. The most recent Distillers album, "Coral Fang" (Sire), ends with a dreary 12-minute noise-punk creation called "Death Sex," which should be self-parody but isn't.
Still, the album is filled with serviceable punk rants like "Die on a Rope," a gothic love story that was the first song of the night. While the band sped through a three-chord riff, Ms. Dalle snarled, "Tell me something/Tell me something/Will I die, will I die on a rope?"
The band members didn't add much flesh to these bare-bones songs: that's one of the Distillers' selling points. While punk icons Courtney Love (to whom Ms. Dalle is inevitably compared) and Tim Armstrong (the leader of Rancid, and Ms. Dalle's ex-husband) have flirted with mainstream hard rock, the Distillers are firmly committed to punk-rock primitivism.
Watching the Distillers on Sunday night, it was easy to see why some people think Ms. Dalle would make a great pop star, but it was also easy to see why she hasn't become one yet. The best moment of the show was when she put down her guitar and stepped ever so slightly out of character. As she wandered around the stage, screaming her way through the proto-punk classic "You're Gonna Miss Me," by the 13th Floor Elevators, she seemed like an actress who was just figuring out how to bring her character to life.
The opening act was the Icarus Line, an equally hypothetical but much more ridiculous punk band from Los Angeles. The group has a carefully cultivated reputation for mayhem, but it's hard to seem like the world's most dangerous band when you're playing messy retro rock for an audience of bored, mohawked listeners who reward every song with grudging applause.
