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February 11, 2008
Ssion, Live @ the Annex, New York City, 02.01.2008
Though they've never been an overwhelming word of mouth or blog sensation, apparently the cool kids all know about the Ssion. Could it be that the beautiful people of New York City aren't sitting at home poring over their favorite mp3 blogs for information on what tonight's hot ticket will be? Gasp! Because the Annex on this particular night featured the sort of crowd that could make a values voter sputter and die on the spot. Stunning models, costumed deviants, and a bounding Karen O cavorted to Knife remixes on the dance floor as my pal and I slunk, feeling slightly out of place, to a prime position on a nearby wall. Later, after the blood was spilled and the show was over, I was told cryptically by a young co-ed that I "looked like her 26 year old friend." Though she graciously shaved a few years off of my actual carbon date, it was hard not to be offended. My accomplice had his junk squeezed by a girl who was in the process of making out with another dude, so odd dynamics abounded. But if this was the clarion call that the housefly life expectancy of our hipsterdom was tilting towards sunset, then at least we got this show in. It was a doozy.
The last time I saw "the band" play was in 2003, during the last throes of electroclash haven Luxx. Riding a small wave of footnote celebrity due to troupe leader Cody Critcheltoe's design for album cover of Yeah Yeah Yeah's Fever to Tell, Ssion still played to a nearly empty room. It wasn't a rock show so much as an ironic performance art extravaganza. No instruments were played, no vocals sung live, but one large snake was dramatically given birth to by a woman in a cow costume. Characters dressed as the seminal three-man line-up of Nirvana made cameos, as did some stern, video-projected lectures from Cody's dad. It was big on the sort of chutzpah over chops antics that ultimately doomed electroclash, but it was wildly entertaining enough for me to declare Ssion a must-see event any time they rolled back through town.
But the Ssion that greeted us at the Annex was on a completely different level of performance than the bratty kids we'd seen before. We'd seen a girl confusingly circling the room dressed to resemble Cody's current drag-king mindfuck look all night, so we knew that Saddam Hussein type look-alikes would be part of the proceedings. Somehow though, as the lady-Cody ascended the stage, and brought out a male replicant with her, I was still tricked into taking my eye off the real prize, the regally dressed Critcheltoe slowly rising from the pot of gold with toothy grin behind them. As they danced in synch to the piped in strains of Fool's Gold standout (and previous podcast inclusion) "Clown" I thought maybe we were going to get a souped of version of the former goofy playacting, big on performance and low on musicians actually playing. But then the thudding in my chest made it impossible to ignore the hidden live drummer tucked into the side of the stage, and then follow the line to a similarly obscured keyboardist.
They skipped around the running order of last year's epically underrated camp pop epicFool's Gold preserving the D.I.Y. goofiness that made that first show so appealing, but married it to sharper pop hooks and a creeping sense of professionalism. On screen projections added a continual sense of theater, but never obscured the performers. Cartoonish ridiculousness and ballsy camp were another common through line. When was the last time you heard a painfully hip act gamely attempt to redeem flabby early 90's pop like Michael Jackson's "Remember the Time"? Smug and half-assed this was not.
The set really began to peak with "The Woman," an icy disco track with a funnier-than Peaches brash lady vocal. The shoulder pad festooned woman in question berated the audience from behind clunky glasses, looking much like Brigitte Nielson playing Ivan Drago's cold handler in Rocky IV. Her warped vision of feminist history was hilariously bad-ass. "In the sixties, I burned my bra/ in the seventies, I made it with a chick/ in the eighties I made it with another chick/ in the nineties I didn't do SHIT!" For a show that skewed very heavily from a gay male perspective, the infusion of angry femme was pretty rad.
But the sonic aesthetic here was very much of the gay camp variety, meaning: heavy on the disco, heavy on the 80's Madonna records, but with flourishes of the nineties punk and alternative music that Cody was obviously weaned on. The trifecta of "Warm Glove," "Street Jizz," and the surprise return to a fully realized encore of "Clown" was, despite subject matter that makes their Kansas City, Missouri home-town address downright surreal, perfectly catchy pop.
Cody's voice confuses the gender equation even further than his clothes do, and it's genuinely disorienting to try and wrap your head around those notes come from under a mustachioed lip. But beyond competent songcraft, it was always riotously funny. During the spoken word portion of "Clown," in which Cody tells a suitor he looks "real funny" the band produced a spotlight with which to isolate an audience member to chuckle at, before mending the rift with perfect delivery, with his come on, "that's O.K., I'm funny too." At one point, he produced a giant Wile E. Coyote stick of dynamite, which sparked dramatically before being thrown aside to kindle a small on-stage bonfire. For a second there, we were imagining a gay-hipster Great White scenario, in which our parents were solemnly informed that we had perished during a song called "Street Jizz." And would you believe me if I told you that it all built to a denouement featuring the Cody doubles dressed as Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, waving pistols at each other? At this point in the story, I think you'd pretty much have to.
So, sorry if I'm spilling the beans on some closely guarded secret of the elite and painfully attractive, but if your fabulous metropolitan borough, or hell, more likely your mid-sized midwestern town is graced by a visit from Ssion, you'd be dumb to cast them away.
Here's their surefire midwestern radio hit...
...with its intended video, lest my hazy photos haven't given you the true visual representation you need to be utterly baffled.
Ssion - "Street Jizz"
Posted by Jeff Klingman at February 11, 2008 05:35 PM
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Comments
Thanks for the review! Interesting show to say the least.
Posted by: anon at February 15, 2008 04:54 AM
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