Location: Wise Fools Pub
Band: The Sixth Sun
Cost: $5
Things I missed to be there: Chances Dances at Subterranean; Brenmar Someday and Rotten Milk at Myopic Books; LMNOP and Charlie Deets at Empty Bottle; Steve Albini talking about the music industry at the Claudia Cassidy Theatre
Reason for going: Blood:Water
It's hard to write about bands that you're friends with, because whether you like them or not, you feel like you need to quantify what you say. There's probably no band I'm closer to than The Sixth Sun. I went to high school with four of the six band members, and stayed in contact with all of them since. The first time I dropped acid was with their guitarist, the first time I ate shrooms was with their electronics manipulator, and the first time I smoked pot was with their VJ. I've stayed with their drummer twice in New Orleans and had sex in his parents bed.
I've seen the band form and change over the years, into something coherent, which is kinda weird, because they're coherent and not at all bad, but still not my cup of tea in any way.
Most bands just get together and start to play shows, but The Sixth Sun have been on a slooow, slow burn. The band started out maybe five years ago. Brian and Charles were both jamming with this annoying kid Scott, who was kind of a stuck up guitar ace. Brian was trying to do something that sounded like Nine Inch Nails and Charles was trying to do something that sounded like Tool. Scott was trying to do something that sounded like Scott and eventually became too much for either one of them. I'm not sure if they ditched him before or after they hooked up, but once he was gone, they were ready to start putting their own songs together. Originally they were an electroindustrial group with heavy acidhead influences: Indian music, house music, Alex Grey paintings, Aldous Huxley, Bill Hicks, and Hunter S. Thompson.
They were calling themselves the Avatars, and creating a real dubby, electro sound, but they really wanted a girl on vocals to anchor down the songs. They went through a string of them before finding Tiffany, a bubbly little thing with a big voice, a nice look, and her own songs.
If they ever make it, it'll be because of her. Together, they'd been a good jam band, but no one really had a dynamic enough personality to command a stage. Her songs are basically relationship pop, but she brings a pretty solid set of references with her, nothing too out there but good shit nonetheless: Bjork, nine inch nails, PJ Harvey, and Portishead.
With their dark side (essence?) and her light side, they end up sounding like a Bonnaroo-ready Evanescence, with shades of Stabbing Westward and Morcheeba replacing Amy Lee's Tori Amos fixation.
So when I saw them on Monday, I made allowances for them that I wouldn't have for bands I'd known less about. They sounded demo tape ready, but not album ready, they were kinda boring but it was only their third time playing in front of a real audience. My favorite moment of the night came between songs, when Tiffany started to sing a song from the Little Mermaid (the one with the ,whoozits and whatsits galore). There was an amazing sense of honesty to that, Tiffany was a happy person, and she wasn't going to play up the scorned sexpot image when she didn't need it. It was pretty obvious that given the right break, the band could make it, but it was little moments like that when the band showed that, maybe with some more time in front of an audience, they might turn into something I can enjoy as well.
Next up on the agenda: Tuesday seems very promising with Noise shows at Red-i, the Mutiny, Nihilist, and Elastic
