- You'd be forgiven for thinking the whole "switch the first letters" conceit is, at best, boring and, at worst, cheesy as hell. But then I saw the Will Joines-directed music video/short film for Com Truise's "Brokendate," off his Galactic Melt LP on Ghostly International, and suddenly all was forgiven. Now that I'm able to think of Seth Haley as a shades-wearing, cigar-smoking badass—who looks like a cross between Breaking Bad's Walter White and Morpheus in this retro-futuristic neon-soaked noir—rather than a geek with bad taste, I was pretty excited to see him perform at Check Yo Ponytail 2, IHEARTCOMIX founder Franki Chan's monthly club night at Los Angeles' Echoplex.
Because his aesthetic was so crucial to my original enjoyment of his music, I was hoping Com Truise's rolling synths would be set to projections of cyber babes wielding laser guns, dead bodies left to rot in the street and glowing wireframe pyramids like in the video. Maybe I was expecting too much, though. Instead we got Com Truise and a drummer in front of dated VHS fuzz and flashes of washed out color, which fell kind of flat compared to his thrilling video world.
But if you ignore the visual component of the CYP2 show, Com Truise's performance was solid, despite some technical problems a few songs in. Unexpected live percussion brought his vibrant productions to life while he stood silently behind his laptop, soaking up the front row's loud and loving screams of affection. (One girl even threw herself over the barrier to try and get even closer to the stage in a move most often seen at arena pop shows.) The audience did become problematic eventually, and Com Truise broke concentration at one point to tell them to shut up. But he was laughing as he said it because somehow, at a small club on the eastside, it's possible for an underground electronic music producer to be treated like a megastar, and he didn't seem to mind ecstatic, pretty girls fawning all over him. Can you blame him?