Junior Rocket Scientist, Ugly Hussy and Heart Hunter @ Neurolux (6/4/13)

Originally, I'd considered passing on this show.  No offense meant to Junior Rocket Scientist; I'd just written about them a few times already and had a bunch of work to do.  When I heard that this would be Joey Jeter's last gig before he moved to San Francisco, however, I decided that I should check this out.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one.  I counted about twenty-five people when I got down to Neurolux.  When Junior Rocket Scientist played, there were almost ninety.  A big chunk of that number opted to hang out on the patio, but that still left fifty people watching the band.

Heart Hunter, a new local act, opened the show.  She titled one song "Lullaby," but between her sweet murmur, her church-like organ and her pretty, hymn-like tunes, the name would've fit most any of them.  Her simple, suggestive lyrics had some bite, however ("You're breaking my heart... You're shaking my belief in myself.").  Also, I can't think of many local artists who could bust out a George Gershwin cover and not come off as unbearably priggish (played a pretty good solo on that one too).  A little raw--she didn't quite sing into the mic while playing a number on accordion--but still promising.

Ugly Hussy played next.  I've always liked this guy's work, but this was something else.  This set featured mainly new numbers (they were new to me, anyway) and a more confident, aggressive sound--harsher noises, a more intricate layering of licks and riffs.  Even the numbers I recognized sounded darker and heavier than I remembered.  There were times where, if I'd closed my eyes, I could've almost sworn that I was listening to Red Hands Black Feet.  Very well done.

Junior Rocket Scientist closed out the night.  It's a shame that Joey Jeter won't be around to follow up on this gig, but at least he got to go out on a high note.  Their angular grooves sounded more limber, their vocals more confident and their guitar noise fiercer than I've ever heard them.  These rendered their tart melodies even more agreeable.  The crowd gave this performance some suitably loud applause.  Here's hoping that this group can find a good replacement or that Jeter comes back to visit regularly.

You can find info on Ugly Hussy and Junior Rocket Scientist on Facebook and elsewhere online.  If you like what you've read and would like to help keep it going, click the yellow "Give" button and donate whatever you can.  Even $5 would help.

The Miracles of Modern Science, Junior Rocket Scientist and Iconoplasty @ the Red Room (3/29/13)

A press release about this show got me interested in it.  A band who earns praise from the New York Times, Wired and NPR will be worth a look, I figured.  The right people talking in my ear about this show as well as a listen to a handful of the Miracles of Modern Science's songs sealed the deal.

I only counted six or seven people when I got down to the Red Room.  "What, is everybody STILL recovering from Treefort?" I wondered.  "Or are they over at the Knitting Factory watching KMFDM?"  Might have been the latter: the audience had grown to around fifty people by a quarter to midnight.  That gave me hope as to the stamina of people in this community.

Iconoplasty a.k.a. Josh Gross opened the night.  I don't know if it was because he'd had his set fully mapped out or because he'd seen El Ten Eleven and Emily Wells or both, but the guy was definitely on his game.  His riffs, licks and beats all hit right where/when they should have.  He broke a string on his guitar, but that didn't detract from the pleasures of this set.

Local group Junior Rocket Scientist played next.  Speaking of being on your game, these guys might have played the best set I've seen by them yet this night.  Their clanging guitar, tuneful basslines, hyperactive drumming and high, eerie vocals never sounded more confident.  I've compared their drones and smoothly jerky groove to Joy Division in the past, but here, they made me think a bit more of early Public Image Ltd. but tighter, faster and without the snotty self-regard.

The Miracles of Modern Science closed out the night.  It seems like almost every time people try to combine classical music and rock, they mess it up somehow.  When classical guys try to do rock, it feels condescending.  When rock guys try to do classical, it feels unbearably pretentious.  This Brooklyn band proved the great exception.  It helped that, if you swapped out the violin and mandolin for guitar and/or keyboard, you'd still have a damn good indie-rock band: tidy tunes and riffs, rousing harmonies, sharp but not overbearingly virtuosic solos.  However, the acoustic instruments gave the music a warmth and freshness that your Fenders and Moogs wouldn't.  On top of this, they boasted two hallmarks of most of my favorite groups: a healthy sense of humor (they gave their songs titles like "Gear Pressure," "Bossa Supernova" and "Moms Away") and a badass drummer.  A real classical gas.

You can find info on these acts on Facebook and elsewhere online.  Special thanks to Wes Malvini and the Red Room.

Storie Grubb and the Holy Wars, Junior Rocket Scientist and Ghost Mic @ Neurolux (2/9/13)

It's no secret how big a fan I am of Storie Grubb and the Holy Wars.  I always enjoy seeing them, but that in itself wouldn't have attracted me to this show (quite the opposite, in fact).  A couple members of the band had told me, however, that they'd had some tricks up their sleeves for this show.  I figured that that gave me reason enough to check it out.  Of course, it also helped that the bill featured Junior Rocket Scientist, whom I hadn't seen in a while, and Ghost Mic, whom I'd never written about before.

I counted only seventeen or so people when I arrived at Neurolux.  There would be over seventy, however, by the time that Junior Rocket Scientist came on.  A pretty solid Saturday night crowd.  

Ghost Mic opened the show.  This newly formed local trio had more than a few rough edges; they faced themselves more than the audience, had a couple of false starts and sounded rather stiff in general.  In spite of all this, their crude, clever, catchy songs showed tremendous promise.  They swapped instruments periodically during their brief set, but the music hit hardest when Rex Arnold's screeching guitar linked with Chris Jennings's elegantly simple basslines over Isaac Bonn's thrashing drumwork.

Junior Rocket Scientist played next.  It had been a while since I'd seen this group, but I honestly didn't remember them sounding quite so much like New Order or Joy Division (though I will note that I did compare Brian Anglin's bass work to Peter Hook's in both of my two previous write-ups).  Anyway, that's not a complaint--indeed, that kinda suggests how much I enjoyed hearing their tuneful basslines, clanging guitar drones, propulsive drums and wailed vocals again.  They may have sounded a little loose, but they plunged into the music with more than enough energy to compensate.  I just wonder how come they were only a trio this night.

Storie Grubb and the Holy Wars closed out the night.  As promised, this set did indeed feature some surprises.  In addition to bringing back the flashing colors, abstract shapes and oddball black-and-white footage that this group employed back when they were a trio, they invited Fleet Street Klezmer Band's Shlomo Kostenko onstage to play some mellow, swooning stand-up bass on a couple of numbers.  The far bigger surprises, however, were the set's preponderance of stellar new songs (they were new to me, anyway) and pure hard-rocking power.  While Mathew Vorhies's accordion and Luna Michelle's backup vocals sounded as serene and charming as ever, Storie Grubb's guitar, Dustin Jones's bass and Bruce Maurey's drums surged forward with a righteous, punk-like ferocity.  This performance earned some appropriately boisterous applause from the audience.  Honestly, I try not to write that this is one of Boise's finest bands too much (don't want the description to get redundant), but dammit, there's just no way around it.

You can find info on Junior Rocket Scientist and Storie Grubb and the Holy Wars on Facebook and elsewhere online.

Naomi Psalm and the Blue Cinema, Tacos!, Junior Rocket Scientist, An Airbag Saved My Life and The Violet Lights @ Tom Grainey's (6/24/12)

This post is something of a landmark: it's my 50th in the three-month history of this blog.  That's far more than I'd initially planned on writing when I started back in March (within this timeframe, anyway).  I've written this quite a few times, but it bears repeating: thank you so much to everyone out there who's reading HCTD.  Thank you as well to all of the bands and musicians that I've seen so far.  Even if I didn't like your music, I applaud your efforts to create something and recognize the guts that it takes to get up on a stage for anyone to see and hear.  "Great or small, you furnish your parts towards the soul."

This show would've attracted my interest from its size alone.  Six bands in one night: three on the main stage, three down in the Basement.  Not only that, among these six bands was The Violet Lights, a Los Angeles-based garage/new wave duo who played the Red Room this past winter.  I saw them, liked their music and have been keeping tabs on them since then.  Also, I recently had the chance to meet Travis and Jenn of ORRiginal Promotions, who set this show up.  They struck me as good people and passionate about the local music scene, so I wanted to give them a little support.

Contrary to what some of my photos may suggest, a substantial group of people came down to Tom Grainey's this night (if you sell Rainier for 50 cents a can, they will come).  However, most of them opted to hang out on the patio.  I can't blame them for that: it was pretty warm inside and lovely outside.  Hopefully, those folks got to overhear some of the music.

Starting off the night's music was Naomi Psalm and the Blue Cinema, a local singer/songwriter and her backing band.  Andrew Crisp of the Boise Weekly likened Naomi Psalm to Sarah Mclachlan, and that possible comparison occurred to me too (Psalm lists her as an influence on her Facebook page as well).  However, her thoughtful, sometimes playful lyrics and well-groomed folk-pop melodies reminded me more of Jonatha Brooke (if you don't know her, check her out; done some pretty good stuff).  Her mild, pleasant, acoustic guitar-centered music would sound right at home on an adult contemporary station between Natalie Merchant (another influence her FB page cites) and KT Tunstall, but she had one heck of a secret weapon in Rob Hill's fluid, funky bass.  Between songs, Psalm engaged in some friendly stage banter and cracked a charmingly bad joke.  A good start to the evening.

After Naomi Psalm finished her set, I headed downstairs and caught most of the set by Tacos!, a stoner-metal duo from Seattle (that's the location listed on their Bandcamp page, anyway).  Donovan Stewart's screamo vocals and Sabbath-esque riffs and Lupe Flores's thrashing, stomping drums were respectably brutal but somehow not as intimidating as other examples of their kind that I've heard.  Maybe that's why I liked them.

I headed back upstairs after Tacos! wrapped up and watched local indie-rock group Junior Rocket Scientist, who were much more on their game than they were when I saw them at the Red Room last month.  The dominating presence of Brian Anglin's Peter Hook-y bass in the mix underlined its function as the glue that holds together the harsh, Pixies-ish guitars, catchy tunes, synth hooks and propulsive drumming.  I couldn't really hear the lyrics, but the music sounded so good that that didn't bother me too much.

After Junior Rocket Scientist, I went back downstairs to check out the Oklahoma City-based rock group An Airbag Saved My Life.  Take your band name from a Radiohead song and you'll instantly raise a red flag with me.  But hey, what the heck, I'll try anything once.  And in the case of this group, I'll be more than happy to try them two or three more times.  Between their fog machine, their hallucinatory recordings and guitar sounds and their ultra-syncopated, jaw-droppingly powerful drumming, this group would have made the show worthwhile all by themselves.  Standing inside the small concert space in Grainey's Basement, AASML's massive sound enveloped me and the other ten or so people there to hear it.  Dissonant but tuneful, moody but hard-rocking.  Stunning.

The Violet Lights were up next on the main stage.  Their set had a couple of missteps and technical difficulties, and their recorded bass, guitar and drum tracks sounded too quiet.  But those aren't reasons to shoot a group down, especially one that makes music so tough, clever, catchy and danceable.  Their songs had at least two or three hooks apiece and hid just the right amount of dirt under their well-manicured nails.  Joel Nass worked the aching yowl in his voice for all that it was worth and carved out some sharp riffs on his electric and acoustic guitars.  Meanwhile, Amber Garvey complemented her partner effectively with her low, breathy singing, cool demeanor and concise keyboard parts.  I hope that The Violet Lights come around again sometime.  And get the chance to turn up the volume a little.

One more word about those technical difficulties.  A few songs into the set, Joel Nass's mic went out.  The sound man fixed it quickly, though, and the incident did create this little Kodak moment:

Now if only my phone's camera didn't suck.

Unfortunately, I missed the sixth band of the night, whose set had already wrapped by the time that The Violet Lights finished.  Apologies to Icarus the Owl.

You can find info about all of these groups on Facebook or elsewhere online.  Also, for any touring bands out there, you can look up ORRiginal Promotions on FB and contact them at info@ORRiginalpromotions.com.

The Bare Bones, The Finer Points of Sadism, The Sneezz and Junior Rocket Scientist @ the Red Room (5/22/12)

Tuesday had some ups and downs for me.  Up: I set up HCTD's new Facebook page, and I crossed the 1,500 pageview mark (once again, thanks for reading!).  Down: I found out that my uncle may have colon cancer in addition to the possibly malignant tumor that the doctors found on his hip.  This means that he may need to undergo chemotherapy before they can cut the tumor out.  I was happy to get out of the house for a while and go down to the Red Room; if I stayed inside, I'd have probably just stewed over that until I drove myself crazy.

While I waited for this week's Atypical Tuesday show to start, I sat at the bar and watched Wings of Desire on the TV.  For those of you who haven't seen it, the movie's about an angel who goes around watching over humans and bringing them as much comfort and guidance as he can.  The angel longs to become human, to embrace mortal life and all of the suffering and joy that go with it.  I won't say that it brought me comfort (my uncle could use a lot more comfort than me right now, and I doubt that any movie's gonna help much with that), but it did kinda put things in perspective.

(By the way, if my synopsis sounds familiar, that's because Hollywood remade Wings of Desire as the film City of Angels with Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan.  If you haven't seen the original, I recommend doing so.  It's not nearly as melodramatic, and you don't need to see Dennis Franz's ass.)

The Bare Bones, a young local power trio, kicked off the night's music.  And when I say young, I mean young--I found out later that two-thirds of the band can't legally drink yet.  Don't underestimate these guys because of their age, though: they've got more chops now than some musicians twice their age do.  Nathan Norton's fluid bass and Aaron Bossart's roiling drums infused their tuneful, psychedelic/metallic hard rock with a jazzy litheness.  Chris Brock squeezed all kinds of wondrous sounds out of his guitar and sang with a sly confidence that belied his voice's boyish register.  A guy I spoke with said that this band will be absolutely fantastic when they get older.  I agree, but from what I saw and heard, they're already there.

After the Bare Bones came The Finer Points of Sadism, an experimental electronica duo whose dissonant samples and textures, disorienting polyrhythms and ominous, grisly lyrics owed a clear debt to Throbbing Gristle.  If you have any idea who Throbbing Gristle is, you should know whether or not this group is for you.  Me, I found TFPOS's waves of noise entrancing and cleansing.  It undoubtedly helped that Jacobb and Ashley Sackett packed them with stuff that aficionados of the finer points of songcraft appreciate: covert hooks, beats, riffs, even tunes.  On one song, they called to mind a sprung-rhythm Bauhaus or maybe Second Edition/Metal Box-era Public Image Ltd.  That I might have liked their improvisations even more says something very good about this experimental group.

Local one-man act The Sneezz followed The Finer Points of Sadism.  If D. Boon from the Minutemen had switched to bass, decided to dress like a Keebler elf onstage and started hanging out with Devo, you might have gotten something like this.  Absurdist, satirical lyrics met with robotically funky beats, propulsive basslines and screechy, scratchy samples to form a smart, catchy, hilarious melange of 80's New Wave and indie music.  I heard a little Talking Heads here, a little Red Hot Chili Peppers and Violent Femmes there.  The dominant influence, however, was Devo, and that became unmistakable well before the set-capping "Whip It" cover.

Local four-man indie rock band Junior Rocket Scientist played last.  Their playing sounded a little stiff and awkward at some points--drummer Mark Molitor threatened to get ahead of his bandmates now and again--but overall, their post-punk, Sonic Youth-goes-pop/disco sound provided a fine ending to the live music for the night.  Droning, chiming guitar parts combined with Peter Hook-y basslines, catchy synth and electric violin riffs, hyperkinetic drumming and enthusiastically guileless vocals.  When they all joined hands, it was good stuff.

You can find info about these groups on Facebook and elsewhere online (except The Sneezz--couldn't seem to find anything about him).  For info on upcoming Atypical Tuesdays, go to www.evilwine.com.