Real Life Rock Top 10: March 6, 2025
Revelation in the Mission District, How the Blues Makes Meaning, A Governor Speaks to the Nation
1 Fake Your Own Death, with Distant Reader and Trupa Trupa, Kilowatt, San Francisco (February 19). Fake Your Own Death, appearing the same day the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page story on the capture of Jack LaSota, the leader of the Bay Area–born Zizian murder cult who had previously faked her own death to the point of a public obituary, are a Mission District band that has been around since 2010. I’d noticed the person who turned out to be the leader, Terry Ashkinos, in the crowd before the show got started: a middle-aged, gray-haired man of medium height and thick build, which is to say no obvious reason to notice him at all. It was the way he carried himself—determined, hurried, as if he had some task to accomplish, some responsibility for the night ahead, like making sure the lighting was right or the restroom clean.
Emmerich Anklam is Distant Reader; playing solo electric guitar and singing songs that on his drifting Place of Words Now Gone (Lily) make atmospheres, he couldn’t really come across against the chattering bar. Headliners Trupa Trupa, three men from Poland, were all angles and insistence, as if their music was looking for the cadence of a speech so good you couldn’t turn away from it even if you didn’t care what the speaker was for or what he was against. With Ashkinos on lead guitar and singing, with Scott Eberhardt, Adrian McCulough, Shane Ryan around him on guitar, bass, and drums, Fake Your Own Death sent out an unlit wall of undifferentiated but gripping sound. Within a song or two the wall began to bend, giving off a sense of—or maybe an argument about is closer to it—jeopardy and precariousness as positive values. It was a little pocket of Joy Division in a typical Mission District grunge bar—busy, maybe 50 people away from it, a pool table covered with CDs and T shirts, a few raised tables or counters against the walls and a few stools—and for all the one-word titles Joy Division used (“Transmission,” “Interzone,” “Atmosphere”), the music made me wonder why they never called a song “Fatalism”: that was the sound. As the music went on the kernel of nihilism in Joy Division’s performance of negation crept out. If the-words-of-the-prophets-are-written-on-the-subway-walls, or on the walls of the BART station a few steps from Kilowatt, the purpose of this was to erase them, physically, stroke by stroke. “Our name,” Ashkinos, a school teacher, said in 2012, “refers to the idea that you can and cannot start your life from scratch. I think that it is a very romantic idea, to fake your own death and start your life over. But it’s also selfish and most likely impossible in the Internet age . . . But it is possible to walk away from the broken luggage of our lives and just start over. Everyone in this band has done that several times.”