Swirlies - Psychedelic Horseshit - Wild Fruit -- Rock'n'Roll Hotel - July 22 2011

Wild Fruit - A rock trio is this with loose, jangly, grinding guitar and bass atop snappy drumming. This is a good modern take on garage music with a nod to the 60s, but with extra doses of modern punk attitude and a DIY approach. Raw Australian punk, Cub Koda, lots of interesting lesser known acts were dancing around in my mind while listening to this set. While they did not set the joint afire, they rocked the crowd and gave me enough to think about until next time...

Psychedelic Horseshit - Unfortunately, a bit more of the latter and not enough of the former. A couple of guys made noise on guitars amidst a whirl of electronica, drum machines and maybe a touch of keyboard. The most interesting part was the lyrics with lines like "Every time I'm standing next to you, I want to throw up". There was low-key fun here and formal musicianship was not the goal. I hope they keep working at things. I think there heart is in the right place, but a little more needs to be done to bring this up a notch or two.

Swirlies - The five members of this long running band came from various corners of the world to convene to play a couple of shows. So tight edgy new songs to promote was not exactly the purpose here tonight (in fact there was joking about playing songs from their "new album"). Instead, it was a few musicians getting together to bang out some great indie, shoegaze, edgy rock music from their 21 year history. I do detect Dinosaur Jr. in style, but instead of powering into loud guitar brilliance, they move more toward a shoegaze based Sonic Youth styled rock intensity. I also detect some Feelies, but the songs all vary nicely from moodier pieces to blistering melodic attacks (Yes, if only Jerry's Kids or Gang Green decided to push their creativity a bit). The drummer is quite strong and powerful. Bass and sometimes used keyboards thicken things out nicely while the two and sometimes three guitars do indeed swirl around in between the powerful attacks. The vocals are the most shoegazey sort of sounds with the female vocals in the direction of Kim Gordon and the male vocals nicely understated. I am glad I got this chance to finally see this fine under the radar band and it was nice to see a few serious fans present. The over half full club had a nice time and hopefully did not witness the Swirlies for the last time.

Quote of the Night: A surprise Big Boys comment from the openers... "We have this dedication to Biscuit of the Big Boys. He used to stay 'Start your own fucking band' so you all go out and start your own fucking band."