LIVING COLOUR

Time's never up for the hard-edged and multicoloured metal of LIVING COLOUR. After more than three decades in the business the New York-quartet still enchants the senses with craftsmanship & passion.

The 1980s were drawing to a close. The decade in which bands like Rush and Metallica did deliver their best work, but also the decade in which pop music largely lost me as a listener. The sound of the 1980s was the sound of music in a blister pack. Music whose kitsch stuck so nasty to the eardrums that the sound of names like Spandau Ballet and Cock Robin make the hairs stand up straight in the back of my neck to this day. It would not be until 1991 that Nirvana, with Smells Like Teen Spirit, would give the final blow to the plastic pop sound of the previous decade (and for that alone, Kurt Cobain deserves a statue). A few years earlier, in 1988, Living Colour had shed light in those sonically dark times of celestial mediocrity with their debut Vivid. The record was a storm of fresh air that blew open the door of the (then) white bastion of rock music. A record that would make mixing genres hip and was part of a movement that I will conveniently call funk rock. I started fishing in a pool in which bands like Fishbone, 24-7 Spyz, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More were swimming. 

Living Colour made music that confirmed what you actually already knew, that genre boundaries don't really matter that much. Living Colour not only rocked hard, they also, as is often the case with good music, made you curious about where their music came from. Through Living Colour, I followed the path back to bands like Bad Brains and Funkadelic. Bands that were like the missing link between Jimi Hendrix and the hard rock of that era I was listening to. Living Colour complemented your knowledge and expanded the mind.

I kind of lost track of them after their third record Stain. A gig, as part of the European leg of the Stain 30th Anniversary tour, was a re-encounter with the heroes of my youth. It was an utter pleasant and insistent reminder of what a beast of an album Stain was, and what a powerhouse of a band Living Colour still is.
 
It lasted two songs. It took band and sound a bit to find each other, but once the quartet embarked on an integral performance of their album Stain, it was all hit and no miss.

Go away, opening track from that record, with a riff from the meat grinder, set the tone for a party in multicoloured sound. Forged with metal that splits skulls -spiced with punk, funk, soul, hip-hop, trip-hop and jazz- they enchanted the senses with passion, craftsmanship and elegance.

Living Colour was never a band that resorted to mere platitudes and simple tricks to make their music accessible and engaging. Instrumentation and vocals do not follow each other in obvious ways. No melody over a chord progression played with just barre chords. Beneath those ever-lyrical vocal lines lies a volcano of harmonically and rhythmically challenging instrumentation that sizzles and boils. The exceptional musicianship of the quartet from New York has always guaranteed dazzling live performances but at this gig the band sounded exceptionally inspired. "Never take a sold-out venue for granted," Vernon Reid had tweeted prior, and that thought and feeling translated into a performance that did what good live performances do. It purified and it liberated body and mind.

That the music has more than just stood the test of time was no surprise - we took note of it with exhilaration and delight. Frantically singing along to songs until your head is loose on your neck is sometimes what a person needs on a Friday night at the end of the week. That that person, in politically shaky times, feels a song like Ignorance is Bliss closing in on him and notes that the band's lyrics are as relevant today as they were three decades ago was an experience that was not undividedly liberating. Times don't necessarily change for the better and, like three decades ago, Time's Up. Still.
 
The riffs coming from the guitar of Vernon Reid were like insights cleaving the mind, with his solos exploring the territory from James Blood Ulmer back to John Coltrane - tapestries of notes manifesting into sheets of sound. Sound eruptions that created a sense of freedom, an energy of anything goes, something one finds, for example, in artists as diverse as Prince in his best guitar solo moments, as well as Slayer's Kerry King. The undulations in Corey Clover's voice were by turns like a caress of the evening wind and a scream from the underworld. Doug Wimbish took a moment to celebrate the anniversary of half a century of hip-hop. Wimbish was on fire. This time no fiddling with a laptop, thankfully, but full focus on inspired bass playing that, in a choreography of flowing movements and driving power, smashed its low notes like graceful splotches of paint on a colourful canvas.

From the taut skin of Will Calhoun's drums, rolls rose like heady waves dancing on the breath of a musical wind that was like a symphony of mesmerising beats that stirred the soul and matured the mind. It laid a hypnotic cadence under a kaleidoscopic sonic palette. With a delicious drum solo for dessert.
 
Living Colour opened a gateway to a world of sound where every riff and drum roll, where every part of the instrumentation and vocals, told a story and every beat was a journey through the heart of a passionate musical landscape. A concert where raw power harmoniously merged with tender grace, captured in the brilliance of hard-edged and multicoloured metal.
 
Awesome.

LIVING COLOUR, Gebouw-T, Bergen op Zoom, 8 December 2023

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- Wouter de Moor