Did you bring earplugs? Well, you should have. As rough and tough as those hardcore guys and gals looked, they sure as hell brought their earplugs. And they needed them. For safety’s sake, the Middle East should have handed them out at the door.
Without the slightest warning, a buzz of an amplifier or a knock on the snare, Enemymine exploded onto the upstairs stage at the Middle East on Wednesday night while touring for their album, The Ice in Me. At that moment of instantaneous chaos, the crowd could only accept and revel in the whirlpool of furious sonic confusion. The only reasonable question that should have been asked was whether this was music or noise. As the oh-so-short set progressed, the answer became obvious — both.
The band’s first oddity was its arrangement. Drummer Danny Sasaki placed his drum set at the very front of the stage. Instead of the drummer being some obscure unknown member of the band, Sasaki was a lead man. The audience had a perfect view of every flailing arm and every crash of the symbol. Sasaki concentrated deeply, playing much of the music with his eyes closed. Amid the more furious parts of the show Sasaki’s facial expressions displayed the music’s tender violence. Apart from the music itself, Sasaki’s individual performance provided most of the showmanship.
As the deep riffing, droning and often scathing sounds were exorcised from the amplifiers, one could only wonder how the trio produced some of these sounds with two basses and not a single guitar. That’s right, no guitar. Of all the oddities in the rock world today, who could fathom a band without a single guitar? Enemymine fathomed it, and this aspect of their sound is one of the only visible signs of their musical uniqueness. Traditional rock bassist Ryan Baldoz sat back and delivered the heavy foundation for the prescribed chaos. Mike Kunka (bass and vocals) wielded what looked like a bass guitar but in reality was some one-off mutation, a synthesis of a guitar and bass. Next to each of the four bass strings, Kunka also ran regular guitar strings, similar to a 12-string guitar.
The two basses enabled the music to run very hard and the overall feel was not so much a layered one, but rather forceful and immense. Melody had, if anything, a very restricted role in the performance, though it was well-used in the introductions of “Inverted Circle,” “Man Enough,” “The Balm” and “Cocoon” from their The Ice in Me album on Up Records. These Fugazi-esque moments of quiet and thoughtful musical experimentation were savagely twisted into rabid excitement, as the basses ripped into full force sonic fury.
At these moments the crowd of about 50 engaged in equally furious and somewhat scripted movements. Some banged their heads and waved their arms. Others stood in the middle of the room, flat-footed with their hands in their pockets; unmoving as sonic chaos swirled about them. Unfortunately, this irrepressible energy could not bring the band members to provide the crowd with exciting showmanship. At the most furious moments, when the odd little sounds of that mutant guitar prevailed, they could only manage to turn their backs to the crowd and play toward their amps.
Showmen or not, when Kunka screamed “we are the sound!” from the song “Setting the Traps,” one had no choice but to agree Enemymine had something. It might be stated as a strange ability to calmly and unassumingly walk onto a stage, synthesize the irritating squeals and rips of electric noise together with an age-old standby, hard rock rifs, or to create a performance steeped in furious intensity.
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