If there's one thing we can say about Three Links, it's that they'll book just about anything and everything -- and, more often than not, what they book is pretty great. Especially at the times when you might least suspect it. Case in point? The recent visit from bizarro (and admittedly gimmicky) San Francisco "band" Captured! By Robots.
With band leader (or technically "captive") Jay Vance bringing his act to Deep Ellum the other week, we couldn't help but send our videographer Sarah Passon over to, er, capture the proceedings. And they were plenty amusing.
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Vance has been doing his routine since the mid '90s. As he explains in the video, at a time "before samplers were really popular," he came up with the idea to construct an entire fake band out of homemade robots that could play his songs along with him. The idea is that Vance is actually being held captive by the robots, who unleash verbal abuse on their hostage throughout the show.
Is it a local story? Not really. Is it still pretty damn fun? Hell yes it is.
Captured! By Robots Terrify Dallas from Voice Media Group on Vimeo.
Our take away from the night: Captured! is a surprisingly good act. A show like this has "terrible" written all over it, but Vance plays it well. In fact, he's a pretty charismatic performer, playing all kinds of gnarly guitar solos and getting into some hilarious (and often offensive) arguments with his robots. The robots, too, are programmed to play pretty well.
Granted, such strangeness is kind of all in a night's work when it comes to Deep Ellum. Then again, who among us isn't thankful every now and then not to have meth heads in our bands?
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