2 genre-mashing bands invent the future out of the past in a Brooklyn dive bar.
LINKS and Imaginary Tricks
Gold Sounds Bar
44 Wilson Ave., Brooklyn
Sept. 13, 2023
I’d never been to Gold Sounds, but I’d definitely been to Gold Sounds: Sticky. Dim. Loud. A “dive.” The playlist curb-stomping conversation is a jarring blend of old-head obscura and overplayed singles from the brief barrage of post-covid brit-punk that brought Idles to the earbuds of every socially conscious, reformed meathead in Brooklyn. The kitchen only serves vegan fare, but the surroundings, too-small pool table included, have me looking for the missing jar of pickled eggs. An extensive cult DVD collection is shelved near the register, but the flat-screen television above it plays college football.
I ask my partner, “I think I’ve seen every one of these movies… Does that say more about me or the bar?”
They laugh: “Says more about you … ”
It’s the usual complaint, at this point almost not worth indulging: It’s L‑Train Brooklyn. It’s everywhere…everything an ill-blended mixture of flavors and textures remembered, but impossible to re-experience…
I’m not old enough for good-old days. Millennial nostalgia is often for things we’ve never experienced in the raw.
During their set the lead of the power-trio Imaginary Tricks, Mike Visser, gets himself into a giggle fit, “Anyone here remember malls? I went to malls like a motherfucker when I was a kid!”
We all remember malls, of course, but my suspicion, given the general youth of the audience, that we more remember movies, shows, and songs about malls…
Mike and his cadre launch into the next song and the stew of half-memories boils over again. But this is not the aforementioned ill-blended mixture. Something else is happening: The violently slonking honky-tonk, fractured blues opening of ‘The Loneliest Monk’ crashes immediately into a chunky bass-heavy chug familiar to anyone with a fondness for Primus and other glue-huffing 90s rock-funk experiments. Then Mike’s voice soars skyward, only to be dragged down in a dissonant descent toward the bottom’s relentless groove.
I look around at the crowd. Mike’s howling, “I’m not looking for sympathy — No, no, no! I don’t need none of that! I’ll start looking for a place to be free, my natural habitat!” And everyone is dancing — some headbang, some sway-and-bob, some shoegaze, a few lose their fucking minds, a mosh pit unto themselves.
And it clicks: Everyone recognizes something in this music, but none have heard it before. Though the influences at play in the trio are disparate, a wonky bass line more akin to ’60s jazz greats like Ron Carter or Richard Davis than to Claypool or Kim Gordon trounces over math-rock drum stylings beneath discordant, unconcerned noise guitar. The result is an iridescent solution of all we’ve ever loved about ‘alternative’ genres, each audience member cluing into the details specific to their recognition within Imaginary Tricks’ pummeling rock-and-roll puzzle.
LINKS, the following band and the night’s headliner, are a different story altogether:
It is not despite the hollowness of reference and genre, classification and re-reproduction, that their music feels fresh, but on account of their knowing awareness of the difficulties of authenticity in our post-genre, hyper-hyphenated musical milieu.
At once Anna Paloma, Christina Scwedler, Nick Trautmann, Mark McIntyre, Andrew Links, Sterling Cozza, Michael Craig, Josiah Lamb, Michael Bliss, Even Burrus, and Eric Juberg take the stage. Reader, it goes without saying that that’s a hell of a lot folks… But, they know this. In retrospect, it feels part of the show. The overture isn’t a musical introduction, but the laborious display of the band’s setting up. It’s ominous and exciting.
In a post-performance interview, I asked Andrew Links — the band’s leader whose name you might recognize buried in the above list — why, heavens, why such a large band? His answer is sure and firm: “Maximalism. I’m proudly a maximalist. It’s vital. There’s a communal aspect internally, all the homies are close and they’re all shredders. It’s a spectacle. I want the whole thing to be overwhelming. We’re a metal band at heart…”
Plowing through a setlist of long, complex, highly arranged future-funk — songs titled ‘Sitcom Driving’ and ‘Color Me Pretty’ and ‘Tigers in the Zoo’ (an anxious, schizophrenic shred-fest that left this reviewer’s head pounding near aneurysm) — metal is far from the first thing to come to mind. But the assessment of the performance as spectacular is accurate, though the spectacle is of a different sort.
“The band was originally called Neighbor’s Cat as a dig toward Snarky Puppy. I always liked their music, but they sounded small for their size. So many of these big bands do. I wanted something massive. Massive enough that if there were no audience, the band would be audience enough in-and of-itself.”
He goes on, “And, there never is any audience.”
During the LINKS set, my partner remarked that the crowd had thinned. We both realized simultaneously that most of the crowd was indeed LINKS itself…
This is the most fascinating thing about the project of LINKS, its relationship toward the audience. In critical theory, the term ‘spectacle’ usually refers to a happening in which there is a passive party observing the event — the classic performer-audience relationship. Not so with LINKS. Here the audience is unallowed to simply observe the show. They are goaded, poked at, prodded to dance, to participate, to get in on the joke or be its butt:
“I’m a lifetime musician. It’s all I’ve ever done and it’s all I’m ever going to do. But whether it’s playing in wedding bands or rock bands or small arty projects, everyone’s so serious. There’s no levity in the scene. A show is supposed to be an escape! If you can’t let go at a show, I can’t imagine what your everyday life must be like.”
And that’s not to say that the music of LINKS isn’t serious. From the man himself, “I wanted to put together a band that’s better than anything I’ve ever seen — that’s as good, as shredding, as loud, and as funny as I think it ought to be!” And the band is all of those things. They rip.
The centerpiece of the set is a song pairing, Disco Song and Rock Song, the former of which is a relentlessly groovy lyricless jam that begs the audience to single along in catchy nonsense syllables, speaking in LINKS’ tongue. Rock Song, Disco’s evil twin, is a vicious vehicle for a hilariously cruel game, the ‘Lowrider Challenge,’ which, in essence and without spoiling anything, pits the audience against itself by way of only ending the piece after unanimous consensus. Participation is mandatory.
“Nothing is funnier to me than watching people play music. It’s so weird. Just standing there watching people, judging a performance — not dancing but just, like standing there. It’s absurd…”
All to say: There’s a difference between remaking one’s favorite music and making music out of and about one’s favorite things. Kudos to LINKS and Imaginary Tricks for doing the work to illuminate that difference, and for planting their flags firmly on the side of creation.
What K Hank is reviewing next: Sacred Harp concert at the Brooklyn Friends Meeting House.
