Shellac is a fantastic live show. I'm not wild about their records but they are spectacular live.
Shellac is an amazing live band. One of my all-time favorite live shows was a Shellac gig at a (now sadly gone) artist loft in Boston's Chinatown. (I've told this story a million times and shared it on at least one message board, so forgive me if this is a repeat telling here.) My cousin and I were having a couple of pints at JJ Foleys on a cold winter Saturday afternoon circa 1998 or so, when a long lost NU pal of mine, Teri Park, who at the time was a booking honcho at the Middle East, walked in the door with a longtime East bartender that to this day I only know as "Tim." I waved her over and she said, "So, are you here for Shellac?"
I had no idea what she was talking about, and responded accordingly.
"Oh, Shellac is playing at Tim's loft," she said.
Teri and Tim joined us for a couple more rounds of Guinness, and we got directions to Tim's loft, which was about a block and a half away from the bar. After a meal at a Vietnamese restaurant and a trip to the packie (the gig was byob), we got to Tim's loft right as the opener for the second set started making noise. The band was The Peer Group, a relatively short-lived, never officially documented, but damn good outfit headed by past-and-future Burma guy Peter Prescott. After a tasty set from them, Shellac took the stage, and Steve Albini gave warm accolades to The Peer Group by reminding the crowd how lucky we Boston folks were to have "a monolyth" like Prescott in our midst. The stage was set in front of a set of enormous picture windows which gave a breathtaking after-sundown view of Chinatown's rotting concrete past. Chinese letters ran down the side of one building and glowed red, and Shellac had these homemade amps that looked like something out of Lost In Space. The visual was like an outtake from Blade Runner. The aural accompaniment that followed -- greasy funk -- was overwhelming. I went home knowing that I had experienced something special.
