Skip to content

Review: Disco Biscuits take over the town

It's no secret the Disco Biscuits love to play. Formed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, named for the '70s feel-good drug Quaalude, the Biscuits merged the jam-band form familiar from the Grateful Dead and the all-day-all-night sensibilities of

    by A.D. Amorosi, For The Inquirer
    Published 

It's no secret the Disco Biscuits love to play. Formed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, named for the '70s feel-good drug Quaalude, the Biscuits merged the jam-band form familiar from the Grateful Dead and the all-day-all-night sensibilities of a techno-tronic rave with electronic beats and boings to match. Along with launching Camp Bisco's music festival for improvisational bands and DJs in Upstate New York, the Biscuits play mini-fests, called City Bisco, where they take over your town and several venues for a stretch. This week's hometown, three-day Bisco started Thursday at the Trocadero, continued Friday at the Electric Factory, and ended with a bang Saturday at the Mann Center with an auspicious guest, famed disco godfather and producer Giorgio Moroder, DJ-ing.

The announcement that one of Saturday's opening acts, Orchard Lounge, had canceled at the last minute produced an unexpected treat - they were replaced by the Disco Biscuits, under the group's rarely applied nom de plume, Perfume. "We got a long night ahead of us," said bassist/singer Marc Brownstein, a Biscuits founder (with guitarist/singer Jon Gutwillig and keyboardist Aron Magner), before starting the first of their three hour-plus sets.

Propelled by drummer Allen Aucoin's complex four-on-the-floors, the band found most of its focus in Gutwillig's stretchy, languid solos, several of which seemed to carry throughout the length of a song suite such as "Little Lai"/"Caterpillar," which included elements of "Little Betty Boop." This swerving second-set enterprise found Brownstein (in a 76ers tank top) trading vocals with Gutwillig, the pair moving through dense, percolating organ sounds and a psych-pop melody that sounded cribbed from the Hair sound track. That's a compliment.

If the last set was blissful, jazzy, and grooving ("42," "Crickets"), set one was aggressively propulsive and experimental, commencing with the progressive boogie of "Frog Legs" and closing with the neo-hardcore "Kitchen Mitts."

Moroder, 74, was a welcome presence - a rare one at that - as he's been a behind-the-scenes presence since producing and cowriting Donna Summer's 1975 "Love to Love You Baby" and introducing the world to hypnotic electronic disco and its repetitive computerized vibe.