Don’t throw dirt on rock and roll yet. Starcrawler will just smash you in the face with the shovel. The LA based band came, saw and destroyed the Turf Club on Wednesday night like 15-30 feral hogs. The band is out supporting their latest release Devour You.
Opening up Wednesday night was Poppy Jean Crawford, out supporting her album The Hallucinatory and Addictive 4 Week Love. She says of her music “drive to it, cry to it, get high to it”. Her plaintive voice washed over her fuzzed out, distorted guitar while a screen behind the drummer flashed some pretty psychedelic images. She had a PJ Harvey vibe going Wednesday night.
Starcrawler came on with a blaze of guitar, bass and drums. Singer Arrow de Wilde stumbled out on stage with the look of someone who had escaped an insane asylum and had been living in the woods for years. She took the mic from the stand and began singing and moving around the stage like a deranged Mick Jagger. She sang, she shrieked, and she moaned, sometimes behind a mic stand that just about covered her diaphanous body, shrouded in white lace that was splattered with blood. She has a unique voice that goes perfectly with the music. Guitarist Henri Cash deftly handled the guitar duties, crunching out power chords on a Tele, dressed like a countryfied Jimmy Page, and he played like him too. He also handled back up vocals, at times sharing the mic with de Wilde. The bass player stood stoically in place, John Entwistle-like, just taking it all in.
The band definitely had a 70’s glam rock sheen to them, with elements of both shock and punk but totally L.A. Loud and brash, they dumped gasoline on the on the audience and then flicked blue tips at them for 90 minutes from the stage, lighting the Turf Club on fire Wednesday night.
