FAKE FRUIT with DOLLY CREAMER, Gold-Diggers, Los Angeles, September 26, 2024
PUBLIC MEMORY with CRUEL DIAGONALS, Gold-Diggers, Los Angeles, September 27, 2024
FONTAINES D.C. with BEEN STELLAR, Fox Theater, Pomona, September 28, 2024
[Publisher’s note: document found morning of 09.29.24 beside abandoned vehicle at Chino Hills strip mall parking lot.]
09.25.24, 11:33 p.m. Long Beach
Dear diary, I’m embarking inadvisably upon a three-day marathon of unrelated shows around Greater Los Angeles, including on workdays. Sounds tough, but if we’re ever to push the concertology field forward, I must survive! Pocket contents include notebook, camera phone, merch money. Wish me luck …
09.26.24, 08:45 p.m. Hollywood
Arrived late — four crashes on 710, no spots within mile of venue. Parked along Hollywood Forever, 400 feet from Johnny Ramone. Strange sidewalk puke en route to Gold-Diggers Hotel/Bar — pink popcorn? Venue classy, vampiric — excess disco balls, Black Lodge curtains, earthquake scar across the dancefloor suggesting undead will pour out with next tremor. Luckily, opener’s late too: Dolly Creamer, singer’s name but also band’s? Dolly flanked by three other “Creamers.” Chaotic hooky indie, sometimes Americana. Slower tracks channel Wilco with Karen O on vocals; faster ones, Yeah Yeah Yeahs fronted by femme Beetlejuice. Glad I didn’t miss.
09.26.24, 10:23 p.m. Hollywood
Fake Fruit guitarists swap positions, still effortless riffage effervescing from both on new instruments. Singer Hannah forgot words during coda, improvised: “He was a mean guy!” Succumbed to compulsive giggling fit for rest of song. New record has unstoppable bass lines, eye-opening to see fingers attacking up close. Drummer Miles reminds me of a runaway train if it were also a confident yeti. Hannah telling story now about skateboarder downtown who shouted Loser! at passing car, then turned to the band sneaking past and shouted Losers! She compares L.A. to being in middle school. Band dynamic is hyper, riveting, controlled, like a comet passing when you’re the only one to spot it.
09.27.24, 08:57 p.m. Hollywood
Back at Gold-Diggers. More 710 crashes, didn’t learn my lesson. Parked by Hollywood Forever, closer to Jayne Mansfield this time and empty Little Caesars box, Crazy Sauce cup on school stairs next to soiled clothes — sad I missed the pizza party. To my benefit, Cruel Diagonals (Megan Mitchell) also started late — seemingly venue policy at this point? — dressed like an assassin ghost at a minimalist moon outpost, with her complicated live controller leaching into two laptops. She’s projecting glitched-out, kaleidoscoping images of Joshua Tree boulders while singing cosmic wordless arias into looper/chopper for continuous soundstream of ominous ambient energy; think Koyaanisqatsi (1982) or Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Audience transfixed, unsettled, curious where it’s headed.
09.27.24, 10:02 p.m. Hollywood
Public Memory has taken the stage, a.k.a. Robert Toher and a three-story rack of vintage KORGs and effects pedals. Darkwave or electrogoth? Anything goes. Sporting textless Halcyon Digest shirt, Toher croons weirdly into filtered mic, triggering synth samples and divining groovy fills at stage-right standing percussion. His voice is Arctic slime that stays goopy when frozen. “Butcher” chills the room with lyrical Rubik’s cubes. Can’t see in the darkness between fog machine and green Christmas lights, but my short-goth neighbor is evidently dancing her spooky ass off to “In the Chilly Darkness of Her Room.”
09.28.24, 08:15 p.m. Pomona
Teen die-hards, 200 strong, lined up long before I arrived. Sigh … too elderly for Fox Theater front row anyway. Staked a middle zone with stage at eye level, decent. Approaching one-year anniversary of the show that convinced me Gen Z can handle inventive rock music; tonight has same lineup, poetically. Ben Stiller’s — er,Been Stellar’s—new album is killer. Tantrum-mumbler (compliment) Sam Slocum shreds himself onstage, dangling from mic-stand like 1996 Trent Reznor, over Laila Wayans’s mesmerizing, busy beat-bursts. I successfully predict the set’s closing track, simultaneously familiar and cinematic in waves, and find myself singing along.
09.28.24, 10:30 p.m. Pomona
Fontaines D.C., Dublin’s gift to brooding post-punks and James Joyceheads everywhere, lurk in the stage’s shadows, serving up dread and circuses via Grian Chatten’s oddball sneering rants. They’ve recently been dubbed “spunkbubbles” by Liam Gallagher, and several attendees sport Oasis merch in ironic solidarity with team FDC. My top contender for 2024 best album, Romance, lends eight songs to the well-rounded set list, including the Depeche Modish title track, panicked rapness of encore-hammer “Starbuster,” and grunge pastiche “Here’s the Thing.” People are fainting from heat and CO2; I lose my spot and watch from rear wall, absorbing cool lobby air whenever door opens. Is sweat in my eyes, or am I crying a little as the boys play uncharacteristically uplifting new anthem “Favourite”? When Chatten sings “Each new day, I get another year older,” I feel it right in my daily concert journal. Some close calls by night three’s end, but I ultimately survive.
09.28.24, 11:22 p.m. Chino Hills
Stopped for Impossible Whopper on way home but car sputtered off; they won’t let me in drive-thru on foot to order. Ravenous — everything else closed. Waiting for AAA approaching midnight on a Saturday, 40 miles from home. I survived, but at what cost: if worse issue than dead battery, I’ll now permanently reside at the Chino Avenue Burger King. Oh, shady figures crawling through the fog! Hopefully not undead, and carrying jumper cables. Wish me luck …
