There’s little ceremony as Pilgrim Fathers take to the stage. That’s not entirely unusual, given they’re the first support act of the night, but with Pilgrim Fathers it seems somehow natural. There’s a sort of studied nonchalance and understatement about them – the way they look, the way they move, the way they arrange themselves on stage.
There’s also more than a hint of the ramshackle, of the jerry-built, of the “whatever works”. I’m not sure whether Dan Gardner – Pilgrim Fathers‘ synthesizer player – is sat on the stage at the same level as his instrument due to the absence of a proper stand, or if he just prefers to be as close to the ground as possible. He seems unselfconscious about it, so I’m guessing it’s preference.
When their set kicks off, you realise that while Pilgrim Fathers may cobble things together from seemingly random parts, the vehicle they build in the process is a powerful beast. It’s the halfway point between a banger and a hotrod, a savage powerplant surrounded by bit-part bodywork and pushing through a scrapyard gearbox. It’s loud, it’s untamed, and it’s a lot of fun.
Our frizzy-haired driver is Shelf, and he chooses not to waste the power at his disposal on such crudities as speed and velocity. After all, why drive fast when swerving is much more fun, throwing it into the corners so hard that the G-force pulls your stomach out across the edge of the road and into the forest beyond, while your passengers giggle the giggles of the nervously stoned and you attempt to keep your eyes upon the road and your hands upon the wheel?
Why indeed. Shelf knows where he’s going, and the rest of the Pilgrim Fathers seem content to follow his lead. The destination is hard to define, though. Pilgrim Fathers themselves describe their sound as “the same sound as when you open a door and there is another dimension behind the door and there’s a band playing behind that door to the other dimension”, and as lazy as it may appear I can’t come up with anything more appropriate. I can simplify it for you, though – Pilgrim Fathers play space rock.
It’s a brand of space rock that recalls the nineties recalling the seventies, if that’s not too recursive a description. To imagine the sound of Pilgrim Fathers, cast your mind back for a moment to what Monster Magnet used to sound like – back before the leather trousers and the Las Vegas video shoots, back in the Spine Of God days. Now equip them with a guy whose job is to wrest crazy noises from a synthesizer (while sat down, of course), and trade Dave Wyndorf for Shelf – a hirsute gent with a music stand covered in stomp boxes who sounds like a Dio impersonator on a double dose of the legendary Woodstock brown acid.
It’s mismatched, and on paper it really looks like it shouldn’t work. But somehow it does – with each song Pilgrim Fathers lay down a steady mid-paced rock rhythm and build a huge teetering edifice of sound on top of it. There’s swirling noises a-plenty, but there are some quality growling stoner-rock riffs lurking in the undergrowth, too, and over the top our man Shelf plays his voice like a Hendrix solo, capturing snippets of it and mangling it into a cascade of filter-swept feedback with his array of magic boxes.
Crescendos of infeasible mass suddenly give way to crystalline passages of clarity, an eight-bar breath before we are submerged in the maelstrom once more … and Pilgrim Fathers are quite lost in their own creation. Gardner hunches over his keyboard, while bearded bassist Stephen Averill pulls slo-mo stadium rock poses and the heavily tattooed Kev Richardson concentrates closely on his Bonham-esque drumming. Shelf is the conduit between our dimension and theirs; he’s the one poking his head around the afore-mentioned door, beckoning for us to step inside for a while and wander around within the collective subdimensional consciousness of Pilgrim Fathers.
What lies beyond that door is either the secret of the universe or some sort of stoner-rock knob-gag … which may amount to the same thing, come to think of it. Pilgrim Fathers aren’t about definite answers, though, and as their set finishes I still can’t be sure whether their music is meant to be very very serious or very very silly. What I know for certain, however, is that I’m looking forward to another opportunity to work it out.
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Posted in Live reviews | 1 Comment »
Tags: fuzz, noise, Pilgrim Fathers, psychedelic, rock, rock'n'roll, stoner
November 26th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
just see them as support of monster magnet in switzerland.
fantastic sound, remaind me on the norwey-band MOTORPSYCHO, but they don’t no this band.