Concert Review: Panchiko at Variety Playhouse
Few bands have garnished the cult-like following of Panchiko over the last decade, but if any modern rockers could give them a run for their money, LSD and the Search for God would be at the top of the list. Without ever having had publicly released a studio album, the band still maintains recognition as one of modern shoegaze's top dogs, and on this warm summer evening they set the mood perfectly. Catchy riffs over a wall of fuzzy sound is something that listeners of the genre, and this group in particular, should be all too familiar with, but its always interesting to see how a shoegaze group can translate the music into a live performance. Here is where LSD showed their dexterity and experience, particularly in the rhythmic aspect. Shoegaze drumming often gets downplayed as simple and derivative, but Scott Eberhardt absolutely nailed it on hit songs like "Backwards" and "Starting Over", at times carrying the middle sections of some songs with crafty fills while Chris Fifield and Andy Liszt were working to achieve that perfect tone. In between songs the band, unsurprisingly, spent no time addressing the crowd, but instead used each songs lingering swirl of fuzz and delay to add a nice ambient feedback interlude between each song, yielding a nice sense of continuity across the set. The 45 some-odd minutes of noise built up into an extended cut of an unreleased song "New," which closed the set perfectly.
