I’d heard about Captured! by Robots a few years back but never gotten around to seeing… um… “them.” Coincidentally, I stumbled across a video of one of their shows the day before they came to The Earl and it seemed like something entirely different, so I happily forked over the price of admission to catch the act, along with openers The Falcon Lords.
I like The Falcon Lords’ superhero schtick but that alone wouldn’t sell me on the band. Their tunes – a mix of rock, pop and a little rap – are pretty hooky, in addition to hokey, and fun. Their stage show is appropriately goofy too.
They even include choreography in their show. They’ve also added a new member, Falcon X, fattening the sound out with acoustic guitar.
Behind Falcon Lords there were various devices hidden under sheets. After their set a man appeared and began arraning these things into positions on stage. Eventually they were revealed – 8 or so very complex robots playing various instruments. A couple on drums, one on guitar, three headless robots on what looked to be boat or big rig horns, and a couple of monkey robots. Already I was intrigued.
Eventually the lone human, the man who has been captured by these robots, appears in chains and a mask and introduces the act, then fires things up.
He sings, then does some clever ventriloquism to talk through his robots, then mixes in some pre-recorded stuff so that it feels as if the robots are “live.” It’s an impressive technical achievement and the robots are amazing.
Musically – well, not so impressive. There was a lot of rather harsh metal, some of which was performed entirely by the robots as the lone human escaped to the other room for a break (which illustrated the technical precision of such music, over more… human aspects of other forms of music.) He tossed in a rap number as well and I found myself interested in how he was making some of the music than the music itself. Sure, some of the robots have distinct “personalities” but in the end I felt like it was a puppet show put on by an engineer. Neither I nor other degenerates had our attention span fully captured by robots and we left before the end of the show.
Which was fine because down at 529 was a fine lineup of local bands. We arrived in time to catch The Biters who, despite the Motley-Crue-meets-Jet-Screamer haircuts, crank out some fantastic power pop, a la Cheap Trick or Paul Collins’ Beat.
They’re playing a lot in the coming weeks, so catch ’em while you can.
We skipped The Booze in favor of socializing on the patio where we were saddened to hear we’d missed Tiger! Tiger!, opening the night. “Old people hours,” Buffy noted.
Ah well. It ain’t like there’s not enough live music in this town…
