A review of Neighborhood Watch at The Last House, Oct. 31.
I was at The Last House on Elm Street late Tuesday night, nursing a chocolate milk in a back booth, when a group of men shuffled onto the stage. They didn’t look like a band. They looked like men who had just clocked out of very difficult, very different jobs. They looked like they had seen things.
They call themselves “Neighborhood Watch,” a name of such plain-spoken sincerity that it’s almost poetic.
Then they began to play.
The singer, a man in a worn fedora and a striped sweater who calls himself “Freddy Crooner,” is a discovery. He doesn’t sing pretty. He sings true. He has a voice that sounds like burning embers and rust. When he sings a song about “coming for you,” you don’t doubt him for a second. It’s not a threat; it’s a statement of fact, delivered with the weary conviction of a man who has walked a long, dark road.
This is not simple music. It is a strange, complex tapestry of American dread.
At the back, a large, stoic man in a hockey mask (Jason, I believe) provides the drums. It is not a rhythm so much as a force of nature—relentless, methodical, and inevitable. It is the sound of footsteps approaching down a long hall. He is impossibly precise.
He is anchored by a man known only as “Leatherbass,” a large fellow in an apron who handles his bass guitar with a kind of brute-force intimacy. He doesn’t pluck the strings; he works them. The sound is thick and heavy, the sound of humidity and things left too long in the heat.
LeatherBass
Then you have the melody. “Ghostface Shredder,” a man of apparent, profound shyness who hides his face behind a mask and black robes, plays a frantic, cutting guitar. His solos are not displays of virtuosity; they are bursts of pure, uncut panic. He plays like a man trying to get a message out before the line is cut.
We All Scream for Ice Cream
It’s all stitched together by the keyboardist, a small man with the porcelain features of a doll, who lays down haunting, music-box melodies. And just when you think you understand the sound, a man in full clown paint (Pennywise, the program says) steps up and blows a horn line—a bright, cheerful, calliope tune that, when set against Mr. Crooner’s voice, becomes the most terrifying sound I have ever heard in a nightclub.
And behind it all, there is “DJ Shape.” A quiet man in a boiler suit and a pale, blank mask. He stands over his turntables with an unnerving stillness. He does not play music. He provides texture. The schh-schh-schh of his scratching is the sound of a knife being sharpened, of a dead bolt sliding home.
The Blackest Eyes, The Devil’s Eyes
I do not know who these men are. I do not know if they are janitors, or camp counselors, or landscapers. I do not know if they are singing about their lives, or about the lives they have seen. But they are singing their truth. Neighborhood Watch is delivering the message, and it is a message we would be wise to heed.
