I don’t remember how Brass Against the Machine first crossed my desk – and at first it seemed entirely too gimmicky: Sure, brass band covering Rage Against the Machine. Plenty of friends’ brass bands have covered metal tunes, I’ve heard a lot of it before… and this band from New York City, adding drums and electric guitar, a female vocalist and matching jumpsuits, did seem to do it a LOT better than anyone else had – but still – kinda gimmicky (especially with those matching jumpsuits).
Rebranded as Brass Against over the past couple of years they’ve added Tool to their cover list and have finally left the Big Apple, touring for the first time we’ve been aware of – and finally coming to Baltimore. And in addition, coming to one of our favourite small clubs : the Ottobar. Oh Ottobar of the kitten logo and the slightly off-kilter sightlines…. we bought our tickets months ago and organized a band sortie to invade the show. Knowing how much their videos had blown up online (cause, you know, great gimmick) I was surprised to see tickets still available at the door but the crowd filled in and we gathered on our part of the floor, defended it against all comers and settled in.
Brass Against is more than a gimmick.
Rage Against the Machine doesn’t exist anymore and it’s parts, still twitching, rise and fall on the music scene with much fanfare and little actual impact. Audioslave never did much for me and now Chris Cornell is dead. Tom Morello’s The Nightwatchman is arguably more in “my scene” than any of the bands I’ll mention in this post and as such is possibly the least interesting. Zack de la Rocha’s band One Day As a Lion hits ALL the same buttons as Rage did but… where have they been for the last decade? I was TRULY excited about Prophets of Rage because the Cypress Hill and Rage Against the Machine shows I’d seen growing up were some of the best I’d ever seen – but they haven’t really gone and done much. Tool and A Perfect Circle have always been on the ragged-edge of artsy and as time has worn on they’ve become less revolutionary and more like hubristic caricatures of Maynard James Keenan …
The music’s still good, but it’s like we needed someone else to pick up the torch.
I went to see the Indigo Girls a week or two before the 2016 election and they didn’t seem to think their political voice was needed. Ministry returned to touring AFTER the 2016 election because Al Jourgensen felt his voice WAS needed again. I’ve often said we need Rage Against the Machine back, but it’s not coming, and I think it’s fair to argue that Brass Against is even better.
Watching a black woman scream “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!!!” seems so much more powerful than watching Rage ever was, and Brass Against – just by nature of being a multi-piece brass band with complex arrangements – is far tighter than any of the bands they cover… I’ve seen almost every song they performed last night played by the original artist – Tool, Rage, Jane’s Addiction – and the ferocity with which Brass Against performed (? “performance” denotes something false to some extent – and it’s the HONESTY pouring off this act that brought me to literal tears last night) these songs elevated everything to something that left me sweating and twisted – but in a good way.
It’s sightly strange to step back and think about the strange bedfellows of joy and rage present in their act. There’s often a communal joy that comes from watching brass bands perform. The interlock and interplay is powerful and infectious. But then given such DRIVE and PURPOSE as in this act – I think my brain is still reeling and I’m not doing them justice with my words. The videos don’t do them justice. I was pretty sure a CD wouldn’t do them justice. Hell, justice is what the band’s about – so no gimmick – go see Brass Against.
