Salami Rose Joe Louis with Morgan Garrett and Andy Loebs
Johnny Brenda's
1201 Frankford Ave.
Philadelphia
Nov. 25, 2024
“I won’t sing. I won’t sing. I won’t sing. I won’t sing!”
Performance artist Morgan Garrett groaned that promise into the microphone at Johnny Brenda’s Monday night, stamping an envelope of genre-traveling acts with his stubborn saliva before mailing the room off to outer space.
Garrett performed a stripped-back show streaked in strobe lights, circumventing screamo through anxiety-ridden whisper rock. He then passed the baton onto Andy Loebs, who performed an electronic collage of beats self-described as a “zoinked-out” sound. That paved the way for headliner Salami Joe Rose Louis to cap off the night with an elusive set that melded jazz and hip hop but centered around intergalactic experimentation.
The common denominator among the bands was their difference: All three groups refused to be caught up in categories. Together, the full show felt like rocketing to the moon on a school bus filled with neurodivergent but capable student prodigies.
Garrett’s refusal to sing is the lyrical basis of his latest album, Purity, which he wrote to process the experience of happening upon his neighbor’s dead body. His music involves psychological self-profiling through heavy reduction: “I’m only sex, I’m only hell, I’m only words, oh fucking well,” he states in “Tearful Life.” Though his act involves just himself and one bandmate, producing heavy but sparse rhythms on a pair of guitars, the performance is defined by a heavy maximalism. Speaking little but loudly can say a lot.
There was no relief — only escalation — with Andy Loebs, who jumped among techno, prog rock, house music, and ostensibly digital onomatopoeia during his electronic set. I thought I heard the beat of a clave, then the sound of a toilet flushing through Loebs’ sound board. It was like an absurd musical theater soundtrack; in place of a live orchestra, consistency of genre, and all-out choreography, Loebs arranged a musical spectacular of homemade beats and virtual instruments stylized with micro hip jerks and heavy head bobbing. But he referenced his own musical motifs and melodies repeatedly, gushing a genuine flair that conjured up David Byrne theatricalities more so than hyperpop trollisms.
I could feel my heart pumping and the blood moving loudly through my veins after Loebs stepped off stage.
“Is Pepperoni up next?” I heard an audience member ask. It was the cherry-on-top introduction to an already anarchic night.
Salami Joe Rose Louis took the ferris-wheel ride down to oceanic depths with full-fledged, four-piece psychedelia. Salami’s voice was familiar in its singularity: She sounded similar at times to the likes of Billie Holiday, Jessica Pratt, Alice Phoebe Lou, to name a few. The band jumped between styles while maintaining a jazzy tone, verging at times into what I might name savory shoegaze — marked by a tamer, somehow healthier, type of distortion than I’m used to.
Through songs like “Zaza Flip,” the group whipped up a clashing, whirlpool of sound that, when I closed my eyes, built into a slow-motion tsunami. The drums, guitar, bass and vocals merged together, glossy and blended but curving in a way that felt endless, somehow ancient in its arching nature, like a rapid series of sunrises and sunsets.
When I finally opened my eyes, I realized the musicians were all drooping over their instruments, Salami’s head resting entirely on her keyboard.
It was an expression of warranted exhaustion not unlike Garrett’s opening protest (“I won’t sing!”). And it was my sign that the night was not a nonsensical nightmare gone right, but rather a true show of label-defying showmanship.
Making sense of an absurd world is exhausting. So is making music.
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