COIL: The Rise and Fall of the Rising Fallen

Photo/Ryan Jensen

This "how the band met" tale from Banana Bag & Bodice is punk absurdism taken to a point at which it hardly seems satirical of the genre, a point at which it's as easy for me to believe that the Rising Fallen once toured the oil rig circuit (or at least an oil rig), finding themselves and their message amidst the cranks of their amps and the slosh of the oil, the hiss of the steam, the heat of the metal cage, and the constantly coerced blow jobs. The lyrics are nonsense ("And I tried to turn a monkey into a bee/and I lied when I wrote the wrong history"), but Peter Blomquist's giving one hell of a performance in his delivery of them, looking all the while like he's being electrocuted by the words, jerking around and collapsing to the floor after every song. It's an energetic mind-fuck, but their little living room performance space, where everything is everything, needs a little insulation to ground us.

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