Talk Normal - Still suffering a cold, I navigate through the rain to the DC9 for a nice little show featuring two out-of-town bands. First up is Brooklyn's Talk Normal who are simply two women with guitars, drums, some bass, electronica, and voice. The first songs sounds kind of cool with industrial riffing on top of a tribal thump. There's some white noise going on and interesting vocal work. I am immediately thinking that I will easily respect this band, but I am not sure I will rave about them. By the end of the second song, they hooked me completely. The vocal chants reminded me a bit of the Slits in front of Swell Maps most distorted rock tones. There is a lot of more musically oriented no wave sound and I find their use of space and edgy tones remind me quite a bit of Suicide. The sound is different with guitar and drums being the key. This band is a textbook example of how you can take average musical ability and apply a powerful vision and broad imagination to create unique music of monstrous proportions. This was the soundtrack to my feverish attempt to sleep the other night. Jarring and lovely.
Weekend - This is a power trio from San Francisco. They play a nice brand of psychadelic shoegaze style rock. The rhythms are heavy with a mototik on the faster numbers. They slow it down a bit to show some nice variety, but the quicker ones are the really fun songs. They kind of remind me of a band playing Wire's 154 songs fast and hard. The only real criticism I had was with the vocals. The bass player sings a lot and I am guessing he has a pretty good voice. And that is the main problem I had was that I had to guess. The vocals were buried and dull. In the faster songs, it didn't matter as much but it did add up over the whole set. I think if they fix that, there is little they could not accomplish as the set was still fiery and exciting. This band has made a nice little name for itself and pulled in a good sized crowd tonight. They lived up to the hype and appeared to send everyone home happy. And I was happy that the quality of music made me forget about my cold for a while.
Quote of the Night: "We'll do that over." after a false start on one Weekend song. As good as the music was, it wasn't a night for stage patter or anything interesting I heard from the crowd. Probably more interesting was seeing a guy in an Arsenal jacket the week after they gave up eight goals which they have not done since William McKinley first beat William Jennings Bryan. That takes a punk attitude.
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