There wasn't much of a crowd for this show, possibly due to the fact that quite a few other shows were scheduled this night. Oh well. For those other folks' sakes, I hope that those shows were as good as this one was.
First up this night was local four-man horror punk group The Acrotomoans. I've never had a band dedicate nearly every song of their set to me before. That's what I got for having worked with their bass player, Kyle Mann, for over two years at a call center (he still works there, poor bastard). At least the dedications came from a kick-ass band. Their punk-metal sound emphasized punk over metal and was all the better for it: they deployed their bonesawing guitar riffs and freight-train basslines and drumming in the service of smart, well-crafted three/four-minute songs. I could hear some traces of Axl Rose and Glenn Danzig in frontman Luke Gushwa's powerful groan-and-growl, but he was savvy enough not to let influence become imitation. It was damn good stuff, although I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about having a song entitled "Left to Rot" dedicated to me.
After The Acrotomoans came The Bloody Mess Rock Circus. You know a punk/hard rock band's good when they can stick a Doors medley into their set (and include some of their best tracks too--"Roadhouse Blues," "Back Door Man," "Break On Through") and not have their originals sound the worse for it. Christopher T. Baggins and Justin Case's lean, muscular bass and drums provided the perfect platform for Andy Friend's galvanizing guitar work and Bloody F. Mess' shrewd, rough vocals. When they switched to acoustic for one song, it only made even clearer how sharp their songwriting is. They made me think a little of Alice Cooper's early stuff (Love It to Death, Killer), only faster and even tougher. It's really a shame that more people weren't there to see them: this was real Saturday night music if there ever was any.
You can find info about both of these groups of Facebook and elsewhere online.
Ben, we have talked about this before. I just don't understand what is going on with the "fans" here and even the clubs. No one goes to these shows and maybe because they don't know about them. It is shocking that nearly every show you write about has the comment that it was ill attended.
ReplyDeleteBoise has a great bunch of bands but no fans. The opening bands don't stay and watch the later bands and the fans of one band will leave before another band even starts. It seems that they don't want to hear music, they just want to be seen at the right places by there friends.
I keep my opinions to myself (or at least out of a public venue, because being in a band I naturally feel that my shows are poorly attended because I suck. But I have seen 4 bands in 10 days that were really good and on a very high professional level, and the total of people in all 4 audiences would number less than 50.
Yeah, honestly, I don't get it either. I can understand if some folks have other obligations (kids, jobs, etc.), and I do think that part of it is simply that people don't know about some of these shows (I didn't know exactly where the Shredder was until this year). Still... Yeah, I don't get it. But hey, that's a big part of why I'm doing what I'm doing with this blog right now.
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