Hot & Cold @ D-22, 15 June 2010

By Sophia, 2010年 6月 23日

From the first aggresively danceable beats launched from their drum pad, Hot & Cold kicked me in the musical crotch. Simon & Josh Frank writhe with energy, attacking their instruments and mics to lay a sheet of distortion over austere instrumentation. A natural pairing with The Offset: Spectacles with whom they played at D22 as part of a cassette release from the Rose Mansion Analog label, Hot & Cold also induce some serious alienation that you just happen to feel great bobbing along to.

Hot & Cold’s set often touched on minimal synth traditions of simple repeated melodies (when there is a melody to speak of), raw and bleak (or reverb-saturated) vocals, and stripped down rhythm compositions. However, Hot & Cold is definitely not another band of the Dead Luke/John Maus variety. There is no danger of inappropriate melodic lushness or oversanitized synths replacing vital shapeless noise, only an obvious lack of adherence to any one musical classification, an intelligently programmed drum machine, and post-apocalyptic lyrics.

I realized just how into the show I was when a technical difficulty forced the performance to pause briefly. After some anxious seconds of Simon and Josh futzing around with equipment, a huge wave of relief washed over me as blessed electronic noise burst forth once more. The clincher to the night was when it turned out Dirty Beaches was also releasing a cassette through Rose Mansion Analog (“Golden Desert Sun” has been on repeat for a few weeks now) along with Soviet Pop, Hot & Cold, and The Offset:Spectacles.

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