The Tokyo Concert Experience

  I’m not exactly an expert on rave culture, but whenever I hear about it I associate it with England. I might be wrong, but I think rave culture was deeply rooted in the UK, especially in the nineties. It makes sense that a reinterpretation of the jazz trio will be inspired by that climatic period of time that anticipates the beat drop in Electronic Dance Music.  The Comet Is Coming not only take musical cues from EDM. Their live shows, as I witnessed in their first headlining performance in Japan, are built around this cathartic aspect found in the climax build up and the eventual drop release. It’s definitely exhilarating and infectious. It’s rare to see a Japanese audience actively participating and expressing joy in the way I saw at WWW that night. The show started with a tasty intro that was more in the Pharoah Sanders vein, with Shabaka Hutchings delivering in the tenor sax a taste of the righteous licks we'll be witnessing throughout the night, with Danalogue on keys ...

  To me The Stooges are not only quite possibly the best band ever, they also set up the template of the rock artist career. Their first album introduced their unique sound with dashes of experimentalism, but at the same time accessibility, perhaps as a compromise to a wider audience but still kept within the realm of the sound that we now identified as unquestionably theirs. The second album goes all out ditching any kind of compromise with full-on experimentation but with a sensual groove that’s definitely appealing. This one feel more like their own statement. The third one too, this time going back to the roots, to a more classicist sound. If the second one sounds like James Brown psychedelia, the third one sounds more inspired by late sixties Stones through a whole lot of fuzz. Raw indeed.    I’m not saying that Dry Cleaning is The Stooges (yet), but their recorded output -pairing the first two EPs into one album- seems to follow the trajectory of The Stooges album ...