The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion show at Niceto Club, Niceto Vega 5510, C1414BFD, Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina with DT’s and Tormentos on 27 July 2011.
Live Photo (landscape): maximogimenez.blogspot.co.uk
Live Photo (portrait): Pablo Raele (https://www.facebook.com/pablo.raele.5)
Poster Design: Nicolás Valdés [removedor.com.ar / flickr.com/photos/removedor/]
Official Site: nicetoclub.com
Noche de rock in golpes bajos (Translated Text):
MUSICA
JON SPENCER BLUES EXPLOSION
A Night of Rock Without Cheap Shots
The trio of two guitars and drums shocked once again with a powerful performance
SEBASTIAN RAMOS LA NACION
Blues Explosion could be the funkiest punks as much as the noisiest bluesmen. “He’s our James Brown,” says a young man, enthusiastic about the swing and Jon Spencer’s voice. “Today the Ramones came,” says another, a little older, hypnotized by Judah Bauer’s pounding riffs and that voice that never stops screaming. The roots of culturally electrified North American music are on display on the Niceto stage, and it’s a pleasure to listen through the noise. “Blues Explosion! Blues Explosion!” repeats Spencer, the mastermind behind this three-headed monster with a thousand souls, black and white, who returned to play in Buenos Aires ten years after their first time at Cemento and after a five-year hiatus.
In Permanent Combustion
If at the start of the millennium the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion shook things up with just guitar (two) and drums (one) to reclaim garage rock, which back then also knew about sonic fusions and which just a few years later would take over the world under the wing of The White Stripes (one guitar and one drum), a decade
later the band displays its accolades—and its years on the road—with the same excitement. Less unrestrained, it’s true, but with the same conviction that made the Blues Explosion an original band, paradoxically
the fruit of the wild, and at the same time meticulous, combination of the musical heart of the United States.
As the closing act of the Brazilian-born Porão do Rock festival—the other night—the day featured the
Performances by local surfers The Tormentos and the Americans DT’s, Spencer brought the cleanest version of his band, without the blinding fury of other years, but with the provocative feeling intact and an enviable division of roles among its members. Nobody plays anything extra, nobody plays a note too few.
An hour and a half during which deformed, extended, and choppy versions of songs like “I Wanna Make It Alright,” “2 Kinda Love,” “Dang,” “Bellbottoms,” and “She Said,” among others, passed by, some of them unrecognizable or in minimal portions introduced in different passages of full-throttle distortion.
Drummer Russell Simins—who had already broken a drumhead in the first song—also had his time and place for the tribal rock solo of the night, thus completing the DNA of this borderless band, which finds its perfection in the adrenaline of live performance rather than in the recording studio
Hence, the musical reunion of this rock trio without cheap shots doesn’t bring, at least for the moment, new material, but is the ideal excuse to get back in the game and set the stage ablaze. “Blues explosion!”
EL magma electrico (Translated Text):
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
The Electric Magma
By Luis Paz
With two phenomenal guitarists and a few anthems, but no bassist or properly understood hits, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion makes rock seem like a creation of five or six years ago. Jon Spencer, Judah Bauer, and drummer Russell Simins make you forget that this is already half a century old: they add sharp edges to a basic genre like blues-rooted rock ‘n’ roll, they forget about makeup, guitar changes, or XXL pedalboards to pile up noise based on two standard guitars and a drum kit that, with Simins behind it, seems like set dressing. They seem dirty, bad, and ugly. They seem angry. They seem precocious, viola-
Slow and clumsy. They seem like eternal bachelors to whom no married couple would entrust their daughter. They seem not like they’ve just come out, but like they’ve just entered a rehab clinic. In short, they resemble (and, of course, sound like) everything that rock was when I was a baby and lost when it used acne cream to survive its adolescence
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion is, above all, a trio of sonic rebels. Their blues and rock ‘n’ roll foundation is challenged by the dogma of free music (free jazz and free rock) and stirred by the chaotic spirit of punk, chiseled by the distorting tool of no wave. This generates (or degenerates, and truly does) a continuum of something close to a terrible noise endowed with musicality. Therein lies the great value of the New York trio: it’s not about distortion for distortion’s sake, about noise, but about the encounter of melody with noise, the harmony between unconventional rudiments, the rhythm that a burning guitar can draw.
JON SPENCER BLUES EXPLOSION
Musicians: Jon Spencer (guitar and vocals), Judah Bauer (guitar), and Russell Simins
(drums).
Audience: 800 people.
Duration: 110 minutes
Wednesday 27, Niceto Club
like Spencer’s, a spasmodic one like Bauer’s, and a drum kit that, in reality, is just a few bodies and cymbals being smashed together, to the point that the snare drum has to be changed and only two songs have been played.
Without pause and with a haste that swept away the approximately 800 attendees, JSBX threw to who-knows-where that rule that rock is made with guitar, bass, and drums (the White Stripes also drew from this and, although they use bass, the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club). Everything was proof enough, from “2kindsa Love” to “Dang,” passing through “Bell-bottoms” and “Burn It Out.” JSBX is, then, a crusade for the modernization of foundational music that fulfilled its function of modernity for its era, but that woke up thousands Among them were Spencer, Bauer, and Simins, who appropriated all that effervescence and brutality in a treacherous number of albums (nine originals, nine extended versions, and seven bootlegs) which, at Spencer’s third concert (the band’s second, after their rather mythical Cemento show in 2001) in Buenos Aires, were enjoyed compressed into a two-hour show at Nice-to Club the day before yesterday. Compressed like pills of youthful nectar for this aging rock.
Drum Stick from this show:
