Architects Of Delirium: Pinkish Black Stun Glendale

Review by Andrew Bansal, photos by Matt Nielson

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August 31st 2016, Complex, Glendale CA: Fort Worth, Texas experimental duo Pinkish Black recently concluded a two-week headline run, bringing their synth-heavy prog psych madness to stages across the US West Coast. Formed in 2010, the band has delivered three compelling studio full-length albums each on different labels, the latest release ‘Bottom Of The Morning’ having surfaced in 2015 via Relapse Records. They opened for Italian prog masters Goblin on a run of dates in 2014 and gained attention from a lot of people that were unfamiliar with them, and have been playing their own shows this year, drawing a good segment of that Goblin crowd to see them headline. Last Wednesday August 31st 2016, they arrived in the Los Angeles area for a gig at Complex in Glendale put together by Church Of The 8th Day and featuring openers Upsilon Acrux, Spirit Collector and Jason Christoper Watkins. Many had been eagerly awaiting this show in the weeks leading up to it, while some had ventured in on strong recommendations of their friends. Regardless, both sets of folks were in for quite a treat.

Opening the show Jason Christopher Watkins, the keyboardist of LA psych/prog/doom trio Ancestors, performing his own music here as a solo act. With his dual keyboard setup, he presented some ambient, soundtrack-like music which took at least a few minutes to come into its own and grow on the audience, but once it did, it showed its power and made an impact. Watkins performed material off of his forthcoming debut album ‘Crepuscular’, slated for release October 8th 2016. The use of keyboards in hard rock goes back to the ’60s and ’70s, and it appears as if things are coming full circle because keyboard-driven music has found its fanbase even in the world of heavy music in recent years. Taking the headliner’s musical style into consideration, Jason Christopher Watkins’ dark, haunting set served as a great opening act. His arrangements relied heavily on quiet, tense segments but the sheer volume of his set balanced this trait perfectly and ensured the audience’s undivided attention. The benchmark had been set, and expectations from the three remaining bands were significantly raised.

Jason Christoper Watkins
Jason Christoper Watkins

In contrast to the opener, things shifted to the good old classic power trio setup, as LA-based Spirit Collector took the stage for a set of instrumental sludge/doom, reliant on melody, groove and undeniable synchronicity between the three members. Based on simple, catchy guitar melodies, all their compositions followed a similar theme and pattern, but they still showed enough variety to make each tune distinct and recognizable. Without vocals or a clear frontman, it’s no mean feat to compel a bunch of first-timers to take notice , but Spirit Collector sure succeeded in doing so, and as great as they actually were in the absolute sense, they were made to look and sound even better by the band that followed.

Spirit Collector
Spirit Collector

Thanks to the aftermath of Psycho Las Vegas, most of LA’s stoner/doom/experimental rock fans had stayed home and the turnout here was not bad but far from satisfying. But as soon as Spirit Collector’s set ended, the room got quickly filled with a large group of folks that had specifically come here to watch the next band, and not that we ever judge people based on their looks at shows like these, but with one glance at this crowd we could easily predict that they were going to leave straight after this next band, Upsilon Acrux, a Los Angeles based five-piece instrumental group. Have you ever gone into a jam room with four friends of yours and each picked up an instrument and started randomly jamming in a nonsensical manner with no structure or rhythm whatsoever, or watched five of your friends do so? That’s what Upsilon Acrux sounded like, a chaotic, stress-inducing instrumental hodgepodge of nothingness, and the fact that they had two drummers on stage made it even worse. If you’ve experienced the beauty and power of good music, you must know there is also the other side of the coin that exhibits the horrors of bad music, and this band was the perfect demonstration of it. As our photographer Matt Nielson rightly put it, Upsilon Acrux were playing instruments, not music. To put it mildly, it was like if all members of Mahavishnu Orchestra were horribly out of their minds and completely out of synch with each other and had decided to torture their audience. Upsilon Acrux is without doubt the worst band I have seen in a long time, and hopefully they will maintain that ranking for the foreseeable future because the mere prospect of experiencing anything worse is in itself extremely grave and dire.

Upsilon Acrux
Upsilon Acrux

Restoring sanity into proceedings were headliners Pinkish Black, as the duo of Daron Beck on keyboards and vocals and Jon Teague on drums and synth began their 45-minute sensory onslaught. It was nothing short of breathtaking to watch these two gents capture an entire room with music that possessed limitless power, and for them to be able to do it with such little effort really proved the quality and class of the songwriting. They created quite an impression on a much bigger stage in front of a much larger number of people at the Fonda Theatre when they opened for Goblin in 2014, but this Pinkish Black experience at a place like Complex was on a whole another altitude of its own, the intensity of the music amplified tenfold by the size and shape of the room and aided further by the high-quality front-of-house mix and PA here.

Fans of the band couldn’t hold back their excitement, and first-timers gazed with dropped jaws for the entirety of the set. The 9-minute title track from the newest album ‘Bottom Of The Morning’ was the highlight of the set with its synth-driven proggy passages, grippingly tense interludes and crushing heavy drum parts, but the entire performance as a whole was simply brilliant and was a true representation of the magic of synth-based progressive psychedelic music. Pinkish Black have proven their mastery and craftiness with their own tunes and are as powerful of a two-piece musical group as any, but aside from what they’re doing on their own, it would be interesting to see if they’d ever collaborate with other artists, in a manner similar to how the bands The Body and Full Of Hell have done recently. But whatever form they present their music in, Pinkish Black is a must-listen for fans of all things prog, synth and psych.

Overall, a worthwhile evening in Glendale, three parts enjoyable and one part torturous.

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Pinkish Black
Pinkish Black

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