Words by Audra Tracy
“We came all the way from Staten Island, so you better be fucking ready”, Jared Tankel warned fans lining the stage at Asbury Lanes as his group, The Budos Band, dug into a deviant set. In town plugging their new LP, Burnt Offering, the dark lords of Daptone Records booked a show at the one place on the Jersey shore where hippies and headbangers can find middle ground – a bowling alley in Asbury Park.
Asbury Lanes is not your ordinary music venue. It’s a place where you can literally watch opening act Electric Citizen thrash around on-stage while you bowl. It’s a place where all the inked, the bearded, the starving artists, and the wanderers can be as weird as they wanna be. And it’s the perfect place for free spirits like The Budos Band to, as Tankel put it, “go to the beach and lose our minds”. Yes, tonight’s line-up fit right in with this kinda crowd.
Just before 11, the headliner took the stage, wielding their instruments like weapons. Mixing elements of Afrobeat with menacing metal undertones, the seven-piece projected pure evil without singing a word. Sure, there’s no vocalist, but the horn section was like the Robert Plant of the band, adding stark textures over the heavy grooves brewed up by strings and percussion.
As the band tore into their set, more ‘dated’ material like ‘Ride or Die’ and ‘Black Venom’ gave us that old familiar feeling. But it was songs off Burnt Offering that truly stole the show. ‘Sticks’, ‘Aphasia’ and the album’s title track made their Garden State debuts, showing a more psychedelic side of the Budos brotherhood.
The sounds emanating from the speakers may have been dark and eerie, but the atmosphere was anything but. Whereas nice, proper people go to church to listen to traditional hymns, it seems us misfits go to Asbury Lanes in worship of The Budos Band.
Go ahead, pre-order Burnt Offering here.
www.thebudos.com
TheWaster.com | Asbury Park
10.14.14
