Zola Jesus
CAMP Basement, September ‘10

Earlier this year I went to see Zola Jesus play, just about the point at which the hype was about to boil over and people who weren’t really interested decided they needed to have an opinion, I suppose. I had to get up really early the next morning to catch a plane, nobody wanted to come with me, and I wasn’t drinking. It was a pretty heavy show, but I’m very glad I went.

Befitting the broadband-era culture-tripping escapist aesthetic this music has grown from & thrived in, it was like some worried parent’s idea of a ‘contemporary underground music happening’. Poorly lit, peeling-white-paint concrete basement beneath some kind of East End art gallery; sparse, motionless crowd grimly staring at their feet, wincing at the bass feedback as the sound-man ruthlessly pushes the volume on some mix CD of monged out ‘witch house’ type music. Funny, I’d never really thought about the possibility of listening to that stuff loudly before. It’s always been background volume, computer speaker music to me. I dunno whether this kind of weight improves it or not, but it at least helps this potentially bland, style-over-contenty sound achieve a reassuring level of obnoxiousness, hitting some combo of pummelling, sleepy and intimidating with requisite discomfort.

Presently, two serious-looking dudes stand behind keyboards – big old Yamaha, Casio ones, like every kid in school used to have. That’s fine, but the complete lack of pedals and backline amps unnerves my rockist sensibilities. Is some straight DIed fucking 1989 Christmas present really gonna make the grade here? It feels like I’ve been standing on this hard floor for about, like, eight hours or something, sipping this bottle of tap water, waiting for something to happen. She’s a big famous act now after all, this Zola Jesus, I’m sure she knows how to deliver.

The guy with the keyboard rig on the right is really something. Greasy hair, severe side parting, aura of total aggressive concentration – sort of a conquering nerd in triumph. If I remember right, he’s wearing a tight leather jacket over tight primary-coloured t-shirt… maybe even with a bandana tied ‘round the jacket-arm? (I can’t be sure on that last point – he’s merging in my mind with about a thousand fuzzy thugs from ‘80s movies.) Doesn’t sound like much I know, but the way he wears it constitutes one hell of a look. Icing on the cake though is the glasses – again, I can’t quite describe ‘em properly (wish I’d had a chance to write this fucking stuff down closer to the time – bloody life), but they were… y’know, the perfect glasses for the surroundings, the kind he’d never have found by accident – heavy white moulded plastic, with a continuous line running across the top – like those torch-glasses Orbital used to have, only without the torches, maybe? Standing behind his Casio like he’s preparing to unleash the sound of utter cosmic death (#21, synth-trumpet setting), this guy is modelling his whole scene on a middle-aged man from 1983’s idea of what the future might be like, staring us down as if daring us to even suggest that’s not the normal, sensible way for a bad-ass synth-punk keyboard player to dress circa 2010. Isn’t that great?

I was thinking up shit like that in my brain before the metronomic drum loop started thudding, and our man and his brother-in-keyboards start pounding out the ominous, elegiac sustained chords that begin “Night” (although it could just as easily be any of the dozen or so inexplicably gigantic, overwhelming monster-songs Zola Jesus has recorded over the past eighteen months). As when I listen to the recorded version, something clicks to ‘OFF’, and by the time Nika / Zola J herself appears, my mind is pure and empty and defenceless.

I don’t remember what she was wearing – just a baggy white t shirt and tight jeans or something I think. No big entrance, nothing affected or theatrical going on here beyond keyboard-guy’s Escape From New York stylings – just a straight, dead-pan, deafening performance of music.

I do recall thinking her new straggly, bottle blonde new un-hairdo was really cool – great way to instantly wrong-foot all that ‘new saviour of Goth’ claptrap that seems to have stuck to her largely on the basis of a few regrettable press shots from a couple of years ago. Time moves fast between nineteen and twenty-one, especially when you become an almost-pop star in the middle and people in newspapers start calling you ‘the new saviour of Goth’, or so I’d imagine. (Just flicking through videos on Youtube for this post, I found ‘goth-psyche queen’, ‘post-goth icon’ – forfuckssake, I don’t know about you but I certainly never heard any “goth” that sounded much like this…)

I also remember being impressed by the way that, although she’s a very small person, she seems to generate a sense of hugeness around herself. As the music would lead you to suspect, she’s a pretty intense presence really, with a touch of Patti Smith about her maybe – that combination of mad, determined stare and nervous, self-conscious movements, y’know what I mean? Not coolest-woman-in-the-world early ‘70s Patti though, more like Easter-era Patti, when everything was starting to unravel, getting a bit crazed and bombastic as she drove her untouchable rock star mystique further onto the rocks like some doomed lifeboat…

Which is appropriate, cos more than anything in the past year or so, Zola J. sounds like some vengeful ghost rising from a thousand burning copies of “Because The Night”, a song she MUST get around to covering sometime, surely, if only in private, for a laugh. And I keep thinking there’s a lot of Springsteen lurking in what she does too, believe it or not. Hidden deep in the undergrowth somewhere, waiting to leap out and scare us with some butt-rocking power-ballad about a workin’ man searching for meaning on the endless highway or whatnot. I mean, who could possibly be more goth than The Boss? Think about it. [Nods sagely.]

Why do I like this music so much, anyway? It’s not like any of the stuff I usually listen to. I don’t feel any emotional connection to any of these songs, I have no cultural baggage tied in with them. All this pomp and darkness and this art studenty girl yakking in interviews about avant garde opera and ‘transgressive’ noise acts – not really my sorta thing, is it?

But, as per The Boss, clearly I like it because I’ve not been given a choice in the matter. I mean, you didn’t think this new world of grand, Wagnerian girl group synth-angst would be a democracy, did you? This is music that saps you on the back of the head and drags you into its cave. The monumentally simple, direct songs Nika Danilova has hammered out since she embraced ‘clean’ production and verse/chorus pop structures last year do not ask questions or seek advice. They’re like alien laser-stares or speeding trains – get out of their way if you must, but if you hold your ground, resistance is futile.

Every one of these songs is the kind of breathtaking fucking awesome, overblown song that plays when people run out of a burning building in slow motion or dissolve into the neon rain in a (yes) ‘80s movie. If you’ve ever spent time pausing the bleary song credits at the end of the video, trying to figure out who the hell that one incredible song was by and decided it was probably by some act with a completely lame/unpronounceable name who subsequently turn up a blank on allmusic – don’t worry. It turns out they were lying to you. All those songs are actually by Zola Jesus.

A few times towards the end of the set, maybe just to try and make it a ‘show’ y’know, or to justify some perceived desire for a bit of ‘craziness’, Nika does the long mic-cord thing and ploughs a path through the crowd and back, mid-song. I’d be perfectly fine if she didn’t to be honest, but ok, whatever. Returning from her peregrinations as the last song begins, she’s clutching an empty coke bottle by the neck like a weapon. Uh, ok. That’s cool. But somewhere in the back of my head, I’m reflecting on that scary/contrived look in her eye, thinking, we here in London don’t really know where we stand with this rather singular just-post-teenage girl of evidently immense talent who’s just had notoriety and global kinda-fame thrust upon her on an internet-accelerated timespan and started touring the world playing alarming melodramatic synth pop songs every night and…. there’s only a very short list of reasons why someone would suddenly decide to wave a bottle around like that in public, y’know, and none of them are very reassuring….

The song starts to grind to a halt with a series of hammering, martial fake-drum rolls and ecstatic/agonising howls, and on the final programmed beat, she brings the bottle down SMASH against an unused mic stand – perfect aim, perfect timing! Sound vanishes (no amps, so no feedback), show’s over. No encore. Wow.

Labels: live reviews, videos, Zola Jesus