Real Live Action

Six Organs Of Admittance

w/ Intelligence & Master Musicians of Bukkake

Biltmore Cabaret; August 20, 2009

Review by Sean Nelson


This Thursday night was one for getting wound up and then winding back down again at the Biltmore. Openers the Master Musicians of Bukkake started off by winding the audience up. [ed. What’s Bukkake, you ask? Don’t worry about it.] Entering the stage clad in black shrouds, the Seattle band filled the Biltmore with more smoke and noise than this writer had ever seen or heard before. As the new-age metal and psyched-out noise reached peak decibels, singer Brad Mowen, costumed like a cross between the Swamp Thing and Cthulu, crept on stage to pierce the air with his cries. Sounding like “Kashmir” reverberating out of a bottomless pit, the band proceeded to melt faces and prove dumb hippies wrong—the apocalypse won’t be happening in 2012, because that night they beamed it directly into the Biltmore.

An audience awestruck by sheer theatricality was next greeted by the far more straightforward Intelligence. The band played a tight, reverb heavy set culled from its decade-spanning career of lo-fi garage rock gems, but didn’t play nearly enough of them. The shitgaze pioneers clocked in under 20 minutes, making their performance shorter than their fans would have hoped.

Winding down the evening, headliner Six Organs of Admittance took to the stage and proceeded to enchant his audience with his penchant for dark, ambient folk. Ben Chasny played a mostly-solo set, and impressed the audience with his technical prowess on the instrumental numbers. What proved to be a real crowd pleaser, however, was when the Master Musicians of Bukkake joined Chasny to finish off his set. The fuller sound produced by the band proved an excellent way to close out the evening, bringing full circle a very diverse group of performances.