Review: All The Pretty Horses at 7th Street

You know that movie The Fly? Not the original one, but the superior, messier version that David Cronenberg made in the 80s? Pretend that Jeff Goldblum wasn’t in that movie. Instead, his part was played by Badmotorfinger-era Chris Cornell. Now pretend that, instead of a fly, it was Ronnie James Dio buzzing around in the transporter.

If the ugly, twisted creature that came out when the two bodies merged happened to be a female, it would have a voice not unlike the singer of Sirens of Titan.

At the show, the vocals were the high point. The rest was sort of baffling. Musically, they seemed to be playing some strange tug of war between grunge band  and jam band. The toothless guitar solos seemed completely out of sync with the vocals. I kept wanting the guitar player to just rock out, but it never really happened.

All The Pretty Horses came onto a stage thick with fog and green lasers. They played Ruin, my personal favorite of their albums, from start to finish. It’s strange music. Goth and glam are the labels most commonly slapped onto it, but neither fit quite right. It’s not really goth, because it’s not mopey enough. It’s not really glam, because it’s too driving.

At least on Ruin, there’s an abandon that seems reminiscent of 70s punk. There’s that sense that things could just go fucking nuts at any point, and on songs like “Walking Dead,” they do, especially live, when Venus just pounds the fuck out the guitar and the sound digs it claws in.

Then they play a song like “In Heaven,” their version of the girl in the radiator’s song from David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and things take a turn for the surreal.

I tended to get lost in the music, only occasionally noticing the bare tits, pirate eye patches, funny hats and tight latex onstage. It’s kind of a shame that this is the aspect of the band that tends to get talked about the most. Kind of undercuts the fact that they fucking rock.

All The Pretty Horses played the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis, MN, on 05/21/09.