An Albatross- Blessphemy (of the Peace-Beast Feastgiver and the Bear Warp Kumite) (2006)

In the second post of my series discussing my favorite albums from the decade spanning 2000 to 2009, I'm going to write about An Albatross' aptly-named Blessphemy (of the Peace-Beast Feastgiver and the Bear Warp Kumite). For some reason, I remember listening to this album a lot while riding various buses around the City and the East Bay about 3 years ago. I also listened to it quite a bit during a figure drawing class I took at Berkeley around the same time.* This is an awesomely weird, noisy mess of an album that can be sometimes grating to listen to but can also be a lot of fun.

I've heard people refer to An Albatross as a grindcore band, a noise-rock band, and a power violence band. I don't know or care enough about this sort of genre-taxonomy nonsense to worry about which of these terms most correctly fits the band. Essentially, their music sounds like a combination of noisy guitars, screaming, and circus organ sounds, with some prog flourishes thrown in here and there (the first song on the album, "In the Court of the Bear King", belies a significant King Crimson influence). The music is definitely loud and the singer's typical grindcore (or whatever) vocals get annoying after a while, so the album can be tough to listen to from beginning to end, even though it's only about 27 minutes long. But there are enough good, weird touches here and there (usually the stuff involving keyboards and synthesizers) to make it a worthwhile album overall. The main reason I include it on my list of the best albums of the decade it because listening to it reminds me of a very good live performance I saw around the time this album was released.
I had heard of An Albatross but had never actually heard their music when my friends asked me to go with them to see the band play at the Gilman 4 years ago. I got the impression that they were going to be loud and noisy, but that was about all I knew. Among the small group of people who turned out for the show were two guys (friends of my friends, coincidentally) who showed up in homemade winged-robot costumes constructed out of cardboard and tinfoil. And for some reason, they wore Nijna Turtles underwear on the outside of their clothes.

I don't remember anything about the opening bands; we probably didn't watch any of them. As I said, attendance was pretty sparse, and while An Albatross set up, a group of about 25 or 30 kids gathered in front of the stage, including the guys in the robot costumes. The rest of us were scattered in a handful of pockets throughout the venue. Just before the band started, I went into the bathroom. There was a guy standing in the stall next to me shouting, "Why?! Why?! WHY?!" and shaking his balled up fists. It was kind of weird. When I left the bathroom, I noticed that guy was up on stage and was, in fact, the lead singer of An Albatross.

As soon as the band launched into their first song, the relatively small crowd of kids gathered in front of the stage started bouncing against each other in some sad, isolated little dancing/mosh pit. IBits of the robot costumes immediately flew into the air. Througout the rest of the set, I would see pieces of cardboard and tinfoil occasionally fly around, often landing on stage. Sometimes the singer of the band would catch or pick up these pieces and throw them back into the crowd. And while the mosh pit was little, it was very lively. Those 30 or so kids were unselfconsciously enjoying the hell out of the show. The singer definitely seemed to appreciate this and spent most of the show playing directly to that small crowd directly in front of the stage. He jumped around shirtless, screaming, and climbing on stuff. Anybody who's been to the Gilman knows that the stage is relatively small, but he used all of it, prancing around and gesticulating while the band played their circus-y, noisy music. He kept putting his hands in his pants, too. It was a good, sweaty, weird rock and roll performance that the band and audience both seemed to genuinely enjoy.

Afterwards, while we hung out in front of the venue, the singer kept walking around to talk to people, still shirtless even though it was cold and rainy. And my friend kept talking about how much he thought the singer looked like Steven Tyler from Aerosmith.

I found a video of the show on youtube, and in addition to the robot costumes (which you can see flying in the air around the 8:24 mark), there is someone in the crowd wearing a KFC bucket as a hat, and a guy wearing an American Flag as a cape. Also, the keyboard player in the band is ridiculously short.



*I found a number of my figure-drawing classmates to be insufferably annoying. And back then, I didn't own an iPod, so I bought a discman for $10 at the student store and started bringing CDs to class so I could listen to them and drown out my classmates while I worked on my drawings. Two of the most effective CDs for this were Blessphemy and Daughters' Canada Songs. So I drew a lot of pictures of naked people while listening to those two albums.