It was a typical crowd at the Bronze Room last Tuesday that watched the four members of Stiff Lightning take the stage. (Longtime fans will note that the band usually counts five members, but the keyboardist—some might say the heart and soul of the group—was let go last week.)
Nicholas Kassell seemed especially confident behind his drum set, with the air of someone used to getting his way, probably due in part to the fact that he was the first one to suggest that the ex-keyboardist’s burgeoning career as a freelance critic was distracting him from his band duties. As if a man wants to spend his whole life hanging on to some high-school dream of rock stardom instead of pursuing a profitable day job, Nick.
The band opened with its intense banger “Live Past the Edge,” a song that is sophisticated in its composition, likely because it was a true collaborative effort among all five original members. However, this particular rendition lacked some je ne sais quoi because of the absence of the keys, which most critics agree were what elevated the song from nondescript noise to a melodic anthem.
Kassell, though a sloppy drummer who keeps rhythm about as well as a toddler hitting a pot with a spoon, if that toddler also happened to have a coke problem, can at least be given credit for the passion with which he plays his instrument. One might assume that, given this outlet for self-expression, Kassell would have no reason to be such a raging whiner in all other aspects of his life, though one would be wrong in that assumption. Kassell maintained a focussed expression while he played that failed to mask that he’d clearly disliked the keyboardist since day one, just because the keyboardist had shot down all of Kassell’s objectively terrible suggestions at their first band practice and then made a very hilarious comment about how drummers are compensating for something with those drumsticks. Kassell banged on his snare with the gusto of someone who can’t take a goddam joke.
On the riff-heavy “Detention,” the lead guitarist and vocalist, Matthew Moore, powered through lyrics about showing resistance in the face of conformity, lyrics that represent a dramatic irony, seeing as Moore was unable to resist the conformity of the other band members wanting to kick the keyboardist out of the band, even though the keyboardist and Moore had been best friends since they shared a dorm freshman year of college. If Moore wants to break that once-in-a-lifetime bond (akin to that of Lennon and McCartney) just to keep the peace in the band, the keyboardist supposes that it is his prerogative, although this critic would like to note that it is interesting that Moore was so quick to side with Kassell after he recently began dating the drummer’s younger sister—almost as if he wanted to win Kassell’s favor, even though a real man wouldn’t sacrifice his most significant friendship to impress some chick.
The four musicians played the rest of their set like a bunch of medium-talent, delusional, backstabbing traitors, incapable of understanding that the magic of Stiff Lightning’s music was never about the chords or the rhythms but actually was about the dynamic between the original five members, a dynamic that is now thrown completely out of whack and could never possibly be recreated, even if they decided to hire a new keyboardist down the line, because there is no way a new keyboardist could ever understand the spirit of the band, because that is something that can never be taught to even the most skilled musician, but instead must be lived by somebody who was there since the beginning, and therefore the rest of the band members might as well resign themselves to being human-shaped excrement who play music only to distract themselves from their hollow simulacra of existence, wherein death could only be an improvement on their pathetic keyboardist-less little lives.
There was no encore.
