Lords of Acid: Flemish Funk

Belgium's Lords of Acid played Axis a week ago Tuesday in support of Our Little Secret (Antler Subway), their new CD. And 400 black-clad, midnight dancers showed up to experience the sound of techno in its original formulation. Belgian techno first arose in 1986, in Ghent (capital of the country's Flemish half), and Lords of Acid were among its founders. With Nikkie Van Lierop singing the sexy-girl role and Maurice Engelen and Praga Khan doing the keyboards, the Lords' icy-lust sound, as heard in Lust (belatedly released in the US in 1991) was, like all early techno, a rock-opera thing: a dark blast of synthesized noise, guitar buzz, and shrieking soprano atop a beat both boomy and sleek.

They offered much the same sound at Axis, a nasty-girl sexiness sparkling amid techno's excess of noise -- and with few exceptions they offered only that sound, except that their beat has shifted from sleek boomy disco to New York-style hard house. Because hard house gives the black-velvet buzz of the Lords' techno an even lustier, wilder dance structure than their original arrangement, their show was a triumph of hardshell joy. It sagged only during those few numbers -- the Salt-n-Pepa-ish "Spank My Booty" and "Pussy," and "The Power Is Mine," a funless power ballad -- in which they tried to sound American and radio-friendly. But these unsuccessful diversions hardly mattered in a 14-song set that returned again and again -- and always fruitfully -- to their unique coupling of Van Lierop's cold sexiness with techno and hard house.

Some US critics have called the Lords "Nine Inch Nails meets Madonna," but that's a mistake. The Lords were doing what they do when the Nails' Trent Reznor was still in high school; and the naked cold pokes Miss Van Lierop spits into a song have nothing to do with Madonna's flamboyant revels (though the Cramps' Poison Ivy could certainly relate). Madonna believes that sex leads to ecstasy; Van Lierop believes that ecstasy is achieved by making fun of sex. Madonna is a diva, Van Lierop an anti-diva: at Axis she pranced and pouted and thrust herself into the audience's face, over and over calling for "rough sex." In "Rubber Doll," it was sex "with a rubber toy"; in "Spank My Booty" she brought a black-bra'd girl on stage to have, well, her booty spanked with a paddle. Even in the richly sonic "Lover" and "Fingerlickin' Good," songs with a diva-style magnificence, she overplayed the role, burlesquing and smashing it. Sex is the Lords' language, but destruction is their purpose. Like the German industrial that preceded and informed Belgian techno, the Lords are a sonic demolition derby. Which is why the unvarying fusion of hard house and techno at Axis worked every time they used it.

The audience responded only half-heartedly. No matter how funky the rhythm or dark the noise buzz, only a few danced -- though many raised their hands in the air. All, however, came dressed to shine. Bosomy girls in black vinyl or gray plastic jackets hugged their vinyl-sweatered boyfriends and each other; velvet-haired boys in black face make-up slithered through the crowd, past tiny people with tall hairdos and baseball-capped gawkers looking for the right gesture. On stage bright orange lights blasted, and mint-green strobes speared the smoky air, sweet with the perfume of dry ice. The band's presence was pretty damn Funkadelic, as spooky and rhythmic as George Clinton's 1976 Mothership Connection tour; but the Axis audience spent more energy looking at itself than tumbling or reaching out to kiss "Darling Nikkie." As if unacquainted with the band they'd come to see, they seemed to search for an appropriate response to the ambiance rather than letting the music do them upside down. Must we go to Ghent itself to see the Lords up close and true without this annoying uncertainty?

-- Michael Freedberg