Just a few days after the death of David Lynch – the last of his kind and probably the biggest loss to popular culture since Bowie – it’s fitting that I find myself at a Cigarettes After Sex show. For not only have CAS spent their entire career soundtracking an imaginary Lynch porn film, but there’s also the fact that their HUGE success (they recently sold out two nights at London’s O2, and there’s a massive crowd here tonight too) is a Lost Highway-level mystery.
A good one for all that, in that it gladdens my ageing heart that a band whose influences include the likes of Mazzy Star, Cocteau Twins, Angelo Badalamenti, Chris Isaak, and the Bunnymen have become so popular with da yoof (and this is easily the most youthful crowd I’ve ever seen at a Bangkok gig) that every move, every word uttered between songs by singer Greg Gonzalez is greeted by the kind of screaming unheard in Bangkok since Blackpink or BTS were last in town. How can music this repetitious (in a good way), this funereally-paced, this retro-sounding, performed by three guys who look like hip middle-aged school teachers, cause such hysteria?
Partly because the Texan pervmeisters create their own very distinct world, and you either dress up in black and dive in, or stand outside baffled as to what all the fuss is about. In this sense they remind me a lot of AC/DC – not musically or aesthetically of course (they’re polar opposites), but because both bands have spent their entire careers writing, recording, and refining the same song over and over again to the delight of the initiated and the incomprehension of outsiders. Just as you can rock out to AC/DC and know that your rockin’ won’t suddenly be interrupted by a power ballad, so you can put on a CAS album safe in the knowledge that you won’t be put off your stroke by a sudden excursion into grindcore or jazz-funk (though, wonderful as tonight’s set is, the odd excursion wouldn’t go amiss).
So by any objective standards, this isn’t a great gig. The black-clad band don’t move about much, the visuals are monochrome and understated, the music doesn’t stray a note from the album versions, and, yes, every song sounds pretty much the same. If you’re uncharitable, single, or not on drugs, you could argue they sound and look like U2 trying to make sex music.
But subjectively – let’s say (hypothetically of course) you’re several beers to the good, you’ve taken full advantage of Bangkok’s refreshingly liberal approach to marijuana, and the woman you love is in your arms – it’s pure bliss. The more CAS refine that song – slow pace, heavy reverb, dreamy vocals, lyrics about sex, sex and more sex – the more you’re (ooer) sucked in, the more this band’s popularity starts to make sense, and the more they sound like Mazzy Star rerecording Marvin’s Let’s Get It On. And performed live and massively amplified, these songs sound ENORMOUS.
Other than dropping pretty much all the greats – ‘Touch’, ‘Sweet’, ‘Apocalypse‘ to name but three – they don’t really concern themselves much with pleasing, or even acknowledging the existence of, the crowd, to the point of refusing to do an encore, and that’s just how it should be. This is less a gig and more a piece of performance art, an art this band continues to pick at, obsess over, and refine, an art we want to bathe in, and apply our own romantic/sexual interpretations to, and we don’t want to see the joins or the nuts and bolts.
So immersed are we that when it ends, and we are eased back out of CAS-world and into the Ballardian dystopia of Muangthong Thani (the Milton Keynes of Bangkok), it feels less like leaving a gig and more like returning reluctantly to one’s own planet. A baffling evening in many ways, but equally an immensely pleasurable one.
