The Rich Hands, Meth House Party Band, 1d and Rollersnakes @ the Crux; A Seasonal Disguise @ the Red Room (1/26/13)

I had fond memories of the Rich Hands' performance back in July, so I jumped at the chance to see them again on this joint Duck Club Presents-Manor bill.  I was also looking forward to seeing Meth House Party Band, who hadn't played a gig since last year's Evil Wine Carnival, and Rollersnakes, a local act I hadn't encountered before.

I counted about twenty people when I got down to the Crux.  The crowd would build to about fifty as the night progressed.  Not bad at all, considering that there were three other shows going on around town.

Rollersnakes kicked off the night.  I may not have heard of this duo before this night, but I'll definitely keep an eye out for them from now on.  Nimble drumming, catchy surf-metal riffs, pretty smart lyrics.  Their stage presence was a little on the wooden side and their groove came slightly unglued at points, but some more gigs should loosen them up and tighten them up.

1d played next.  Their bash bash bash, riff riff riff and bark bark bark had the same glimmers of promise--a sharp noise solo here, some rubbery bass there--that I saw at the State of Confusion show last September.  Those glimmers didn't seem as bright, however, considering that I could only make out one lyric: "F*CK YOU!"  I wonder when/if they'll take the hint from their "Rise Above" cover and recognize that more often than not, great punk rock requires intelligibility.  At least the younger guys in the crowd got into it: there was plenty of cheering, moshing, stomping around and grabbing the mic to sing.

Meth House Party Band played next.  If you're gonna be indecipherable, this is the way to do it.  Their poppy tunes and snarled vocals sounded so playful and articulated that even when I couldn't quite understand the lyrics, I was willing to take it on faith that they made sense.  They sounded a little ragged in spots--their guitar player told me that they hadn't played live since the Evil Wine Carnival--but overall, I was more than happy to hear their viscous basslines, manic drumming and terse, noisy solos again.  The crowd seemed happy to hear them too: there was quite a bit of playful jostling, moshing and crowd-surfing during this set as well.

The Rich Hands closed out the night at the Crux.  Their groove sounded more tight-assed and their songwriting just a touch less distinguished than I remembered.  Still, their simple tunes, peppery drums, buoyant basslines, jangly guitar and rough vocals proved immensely enjoyable a second time around.  The original song that they busted out for their encore sounded like some lost 60's pop classic, and they punked up Bobby Darin's "Dream Lover" very nicely.  Maybe some Motown would help make 'em a little more limber.  Anyway, the ladies in the crowd took this set as an opportunity to get their kicks in.  I mean that literally: a handful of them kicked, danced, leaped and ran around.

After the Rich Hands finished, I swung by the Red Room in the hopes of catching at least part of the show down there.  I counted about forty people when I arrived.

I missed Storie Grubb and the Holy Wars and CAMP, unfortunately, but I did manage to catch all of A Seasonal Disguise's set.  This night's lineup featured Jumping Sharks' Reggie Townley on guitar and Z.V. House's Cerberus Rex bandmate Jake Hite on drums.  Thanks to the new personnel, the band sounded fuller and heftier than they ever have before.  Hite's drumming provided a Gibraltar-like foundation for the ever-smoother keyboard, bass and xylophone.  Meanwhile, Townley's howling distortion and elegant soloing served as an ideal foil for House's gnarled, forceful guitar work.  Very impressive.  Very promising too.

You can find info on these groups on Facebook and elsewhere online.  Special thanks to Eric Gilbert and Duck Club Presents.

Hi Ho Silver Oh, Charlyne Yi and LeAnnimal @ Neurolux; Bugman's Burkeback Mtn. Benefit/Drunk Tank Extravaganza @ the Shredder (1/25/13)

I'm a sucker for interesting names, and Hi Ho Silver Oh and LeAnnimal interested me.  With names like those, of course, the risk is that the groups will prove so cutesy-poo that they'll make my dinner come up.  Still, I'd never seen any of the acts on this bill before, so I swung down to Neurolux.

I counted about thirty people when I arrived.  The crowd would build to about forty by the time that Hi Ho Silver Oh played.  Pretty modest for a Friday night, but there was a lot of other stuff happening around town (see below for an example).

LeAnnimal opened the show.  These days, it seems like you can't throw a rock without hitting a fluttery-voiced songstress who comes bearing some lullaby melodies and some oddball, sweet-and-sour lyrics.  Still, this local musician had enough smarts and shy, spunky charm to get over.  Maybe she could just work on not banging the mic with her guitar and ukulele.  And maybe she could go easy with the lyrics about the Lost Boys too.

Charlyne Yi played next.  It was the smirk that did it.  That little touch of self-satisfaction, of saying, "Look how cute and funny I'm being!"  That was what pushed me over the line from thinking, "Well, this is kinda funny and the drummer's good and the riffs are decent and this girl ain't no kinda singer but I'll roll with it" to thinking, "I paid money for this shit?"  I should add, though, that most everyone else in the crowd seemed to feel that they got their five dollars' worth.  A bunch of people stood close to the stage and danced and laughed and clapped along to Yi's tone-deaf, excruciating cover of "Georgia on My Mind."

Hi Ho Silver Oh closed out the night at Neurolux.  It's nice when your patience gets rewarded.  This Los Angeles group's mix of sinuous basslines, bouncy drumming, glittering dual guitars and ringing harmonies was worth much more than the $5 cover charge.  Their pop-tunes were as tasty and their beats as danceable as you could want, but they could churn the sludge and crank out the distortion too.  This was their first time in Boise, they said.  Hope it won't be their last.

After Hi Ho Silver Oh wrapped up, I headed over to the Shredder to check out the benefit for Jason Burke a.k.a. "Bug," a local musician/scene regular who injured his back in a sledding accident.  I was happy to see over forty people there showing their support.  I caught a pretty good set by local punk trio Radillac and a pretty great one by Hotel Chelsea, but honestly, the music was beside the point.  Hopefully, Bug's gonna get a nice chunk of change from this shindig.  On that note, if y'all have some money to spare, click here to send some of it Bug's way.

Hotel Chelsea's bassist Mikey Rootnote did not appreciate getting antagonized by a hot-pants-wearing, well-into-his-cups Adam Showalter (a.k.a. local mock-gangsta act Sword of a Bad Speller).  However, I'm sure he appreciated Showalter getting dunked in the water tank set up behind the Shredder.  Showalter still stuck around afterwards to groove out to Hotel Chelsea's set.

Next time people think about talking smack about Josh Gross, they should consider this: the man was willing to strip down to his boxers and get dunked in water in the middle of winter to help raise money for an uninsured convalescent.  That's gotta count for something.

You can find info on the groups in this post on Facebook and elsewhere online.  And again, if you'd like to contribute to Bug's recovery fund, click here.

JamesPlaneWreck, Black Bolt and Stepbrothers @ Neurolux (1/23/13)

The past few days have been a little rough for me.  I'd been getting over a cold, which kept me from checking out the Coven show at the Shredder last Saturday (woulda been a great headline, though--"Boise Music Blogger Headbangs Himself to Death").  I was feeling better on Tuesday, but not quite enough to check out Krystos and Antique Scream at the Red Room.  Thankfully, I felt fit as a fiddle by last Wednesday, which meant that I could go down to this show at Neurolux featuring Black Bolt, a punk/garage-ish band that I hadn't seen in a good long while, and Stepbrothers, a local act I'd never seen before.  And of course, JamesPlaneWreck's presence on the bill didn't hurt either.

I counted about twenty people including the musicians when I got to Neurolux.  The audience would build to about thirty.  Not bad, considering that it was a Wednesday night and miserably cold outside.

Stepbrothers opened the night.  BANG! BAM! SCREECH! went their instruments during their soundcheck.  "We're writing a song now," one of them quipped.  I got the feeling right about then that I was gonna like these guys. Their twangy, tuneful basslines, thrashing drums, manic riffing and charmingly caterwauling vocals proved me right.  Their songs and arrangements were so sharp and their deadpan banter so funny that their oh-so-familiar pop-punk whine didn't bug me in the least.

Black Bolt played next.  These guys seemed to have tightened up a notch or five since I saw them at the Venue last May.  Their buzzsaw riffs, stinging leads, rail-greasing basslines and quick, clipped drumming all felt much more assured, which made their rowdy, catchy punk-tunes hit harder.  I'm on the fence about the guttural growl that leader Dustin Verberg adopted for his singing: it didn't do the songs any favors, but it was a nice change of pace from that pop-punk whine.  Then again, it didn't hurt the songs either, which I thought said good things about both the songs themselves and Verburg's brains.

JamesPlaneWreck closed out the night.  These guys were clearly in a good mood--Shane Brown and Aaron Smith joked around with each other and with the audience between songs (I heard shouts of "Bon Jovi!" and "Freebird!" from the crowd).  When they played, however, it was all business (well, mostly).  Their growled vocals, grinding riffs, twangy leads, rubbery bass and powerhouse drums all sounded in fine, thunderous form.  I swear, the out-of-staters at Treefort are not gonna know what hit 'em when this band plays.

You can find info on these groups on Facebook and elsewhere online.

Black Soul by Gayze (2013)

"Record collectors shouldn't be in bands."  As I listened to Black Soul, the debut EP by the quasi-local project Gayze, I thought about this Joe Carducci quote.  I thought about it because Black Soul feels so self-conscious.  The whole thing comes across as an objet d'art made by collectors for collectors.

How else can one regard these fourteen minutes of sun-bleached tunes, fuzzy surf-guitar riffs, chunky acoustic strumming, unwavering 4/4 beats, trash organ and muffled, studiously detached, predominantly incomprehensible vocals?  This group--whose membership on record consists of David Wood and Gabe Rudow from the Boise band Teens and Cody Mauser from the San Antonio band the Rich Hands--seems hell-bent on making their record sound like some dusty, worn-out seven-inch that you stumbled across at the Record Exchange.  The shoe seems to fit even better when you consider that the only physical copies of Black Soul currently available (as far as I know) are 250 clear vinyl seven-inches.  If that doesn't scream, "COLLECTOR'S ITEM!", I don't know what does.

In a way, Black Soul makes me think of the change-up that Bob Dylan made when he released John Wesley Harding back in 1967.  At a time when things seemed to be falling apart and the center could not hold, Dylan put out an album that was all about Tradition and The Good Ol' Days: black-and-white band portrait on the cover, overwhelmingly acoustic instrumentation, lyrics that seemed to cry out for historical footnotes, jes' plain folk melodies.  Conversely, in a time when proponents of so-called Traditional Values (laissez-faire capitalism, fundamentalist Christian dogma, etc.) usurp, pervert and otherwise squander our resources, liberties and opportunities, Gayze releases a record that, from its acid-dropping cover art to its hazily menacing undertow, evokes a period in our nation's history when it felt as if everything was on the table and the future was out there for the taking.  In both cases, an idealized past seems to be invoked to compensate for--or, at the very least, distract from--an unsettling present.

But enough of this academic noodling (and, admittedly, rather reductive political analysis).  Bottom line: is Black Soul worth your time?  Well, there are certainly worse ways to spend fourteen minutes.  Aside from a few megabytes, it literally doesn't cost you anything to stream the record or download it via Bleeding Gold Records' Bandcamp page.  Also, as a guy who grew up listening to "Dead Man's Curve," "96 Tears," "Pipeline" and "I'm Waiting for the Man," I do find said fuzzy riffs and sun-bleached tunes pretty groovy when I give them a play.  Given their built-in obsolescence, however, I can't imagine that I'll play them that often.  As for buying the vinyl, if you wanna slip these guys a few bucks, good on ya.  But caveat emptor if you wonder what it'll get you on eBay in ten years.

Flashlights, Shades and Lamont Kohner @ the Riverside Hotel (1/18/13)

Even if I had written about any of these acts before, I'd have still gone to this show.  For one thing, this gave me the chance to check out the Riverside Hotel's Sapphire Room, which I'd heard had fantastic sound but was pretty hard to get into.  Much more importantly, what self-respecting Boise music blogger would miss the Treefort 2013 Launch Party?

I counted over forty people in the lobby when I arrived.  I'd count about sixty inside the Sapphire Room when the show started, and there'd be many more people there by the end of the night.

The Sapphire Room turned out to be aptly named: it had low blue lights and gem-like domes on the ceiling.  I walked around before the show and scoped out the jazz albums on the walls (Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, etc.).  Pretty darn classy.  I had to laugh, then, when I saw the crates loaded with PBR tallboys behind the bar.

Hey, you gotta cater to your crowd, right?

Lamont Kohner a.k.a. local musician Patrick Benolkin kicked off the show.  His sinuous, moody, tripped-out beats helped set the tone for the rest of the night.  They got some help from some typically inventive and mysterious antimagic montages.

Up next was Shades.  I was glad to finally get to see this local chillwave group again, especially since their music sounded about as good as I remembered.  Smooth 80's synthesizer beats and riffs, chiming guitars, charming tunes.  What really gave the whole package liftoff, however, was frontman David Mikkleson's enthusiastic stage presence (did some mild strutting and headbanging) and plain but pleasant tenor moan.  The lyrics weren't Cole Porter, but these days, I'll settle for a notch or two above coherence when it comes to younger groups.  Besides, the music did exactly what it was supposed to do: it got the people dancing.

Denver electro-pop duo Flashlights closed out the night.  I know that all dance music is supposed to be about sex on some level or another, but damn--this stuff actually felt like gettin' it on (or preparing to or, at the very least, hoping to).  It helped that their singer knew enough not to put his clean, strong, politely soulful vocals through any undue shows of prowess.  It helped too that their layers of steady beats and glimmering hooks had an enticing softness and airiness to them.  When combined with antimagic's tailor-made montages (pulsating lights, sparkling squares, clouds, dancing 80's ladies), Flashlights' music worked a fresh angle on disco's inevitably broken promise of endless pleasure.

Not long into their set, Flashlights invited a couple of ladies onstage to dance.  At the end, the stage was overrun.  A sign of things to come at Treefort, perhaps?

You can find info on these acts on Facebook and elsewhere online.  Special thanks to Eric Gilbert and Duck Club Presents.  Special thanks also to whoever picked up my bar tab.

Geographer, On An On and Hollow Wood @ Neurolux (1/16/13)

Up until this show, I'd never heard of Geographer or On An On.  Also, I remember that Hollow Wood played Neurolux last August on my birthday, but... Well, let's just say that I wasn't able to make a proper assessment at that time.  Anyway, these two facts gave me sufficient reason to check out this show.

I got down to the Neurolux late, but happily, quite a few others didn't.  I counted over ninety people, half of whom were up close to the stage.

Hollow Wood opened the show.  I only caught the last few songs of this local folk-ish group's set, unfortunately, but what I heard didn't sound bad at all: yearning melodies, gorgeous harmonies, intriguing lyrics, pretty good beats (courtesy of Lyndsay Wright and Shelby Juri), welcoming vibe.  Lead singer Adam Stip sounded a little hoarse at a couple of points, but judging from the band's recordings, he may have just been a little under the weather.  In any case, he still pulled out a pretty sweet falsetto here and there.

On An On played next.  This Chicago group's dreamy vocals, supple basslines, post-punk dance beats and synths of many colors washed over the crowd.  The geometric shapes, whorls and spirals projected on the wall behind them augmented the hallucinatory feel of the music.  I know that it's pretty damn lame to say that I wished that this set could've gone on an on, but... well, there's just no way around it.  The rest of the crowd seemed to feel the same: I saw the people closest to the stage do some swaying and bouncing.

Geographer closed out the night.  I'll admit that I feared the worst when I saw this San Francisco-based band set up their electric cello.  However, they won me over well before they broke out some charmingly cheesy 80's synth riffs and hip-hop beats.  Mike Deni's gliding, souful croon combined with Brian Ostreicher's lithely pounding drums and Nathan Blaz's moaning cello and beguiling synthesizer tracks to create a sound that was at once massive, dramatic, playful and strangely wistful.  Atmospherics weren't all that they had going for them either: their quirky songwriting showed as much pop savvy as any group I've heard in the past few months.  And boy, they sure knew how to work the crowd.  People were doing plenty of dancing and clapping to the beat on their own, but between his bouncing around the stage, crowd-surfing and hopping down to sing among the audience, Mike Deni had them eating out of the palm of his hand.

You can find info on these groups on Facebook and elsewhere online.  Special thanks to Eric Gilbert and Duck Club Presents.