H-TOWN WHAT?!

ticket from last night

Oh my poor, neglected blog. You must feel like one of those cute puppies brought home from the store with such an excited owner who then throws you into the basement a week later. I'm sorry, I'll try to make posts more regularly.... I've really been meaning to write down the saga of grand prix weekend but I can't work up the gumption to sit down for the 3 hours it's going to take me. Although, I finally have all the pics & stuff digitized on facebook so it won't be so bad.

So anyway, today's post is about the rock show I went to in town last night:
Venue: Walter's on Washington
Headliner: the Matches
Runner Up: MC Lars
Special Guests: Whole Wheat Bread, Something With Numbers, and O'Doyle Rules

The site for Walter's said doors open at 7; so like a jackass I got there 30 minutes early and forgot that Houston has no music scene and there would, in fact, be no line to wait in. So I chilled in the parking lot with the other 20 some-odd people milling around: mostly high school kids, 3-4 people in their 40's, maybe 5 people looked college-aged. There was a mini-van parked not 50 ft from the door on the street there that had that neon puff paint high-school girls use to write on their cars.... you know to say stuff like "SUPER SEXY SENIOR!" or "CLASS '06 BITCHES RULE!!" anyway they wrote : "This Car is not Punkrock" (an allusion to MC Lars) and "MC LARs" and "The Matches" on the side. Great - I listen to really mature music, people I swear...

Doors did in fact open at 7, and the crowd rushed in to fill.....the front 1/4th of the room...yeah not so many people in the beginning...here's my review in chronological order.

O'Doyle Rules:
Local Houston band that opened up. Bunch of 20-somethings looked pretty clean cut. Their sound was pretty poppy (they threw in a lot of "ooh-wah"s and "yeah yeah"s during the song bridges), but in general I'd say they were talented. They played a sweet cover of the Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl" after challenging two guys in the audience to dance-off each other...creative guys they were, they instead started a ska-style circle pit. Eventually, the one guy ran sideways cirlces on the floor while the other dude did fake break-dance spins on his back (you know, like the shell spins the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did in their movie..?). Not the greatest band in the world, but hey I was entertained. Their one mistake was playing another cover right after that Dead Milkmen song (they played a Flaming Lips cover)- I actually wanted to hear more of their stuff....it's a sign of low self-esteem when a band relegates itself to only connecting with the crowd on cover songs (which they were pumped for).

Something With Numbers:
Bigtime WOW on this band. Lead singer's got a shit-ton of energy and stage presence. These Australians sounded a bit funny on the mic, but their crisp musicianship is undoubtable. They worked in some excellent complementary guitar work (two distinctly unique lead guitars and one base) alternating between enchanting melodic sections and catchy chorouses...hell they even threw in some driving song elements that got the whole crowd clapping along to the rythem. I know I was foot-stomping my support to the beat. I really need to go pick up this CD (I'm a moron for not getting it last night, but that's beside the point). Really solid set.

Whole Wheat Bread:
Holy shit, did not see this one coming. Three-piece all black punk/ska/rap group. The drummer really hammered out the whole set! I'm talking about rapid-fire machine-gun drumming, man...hot shit. Two lead singers alternated base & lead-guitar duty (both did admorably well in both job....). Just good clean fast-paced punk/ska music. Gotta say they worked in the rhymes pretty well - it was almost a throwback to murder rap-type screaming at some points. Good times, tho - songs about: fuck the police, smoking weed, and dressin' like white boys but keepin' the street cred. Their tour trailer was tagged up as shit, but then I realized it was promotional graffitti - their logos and shit everywhere. Cool. If I ever fall in with the wrong crowd I wanna learn to tag.

MC LARS:
Well Lars is the reason I went to the show at all last night, so it would be an understatement to say I was excited. He actually set up a full set: drum kit, amps for three guitars, couple of mics... so I didn't know what to expect. In my mind I'd worked him up to be this super-star; he's been all over Absolutepunk.net for the past year or so. The Laptop EP was awesome, but I wasn't at all familiar with any of the material off his just-released LP, the Graduate. First let me explain his deal:

MC Lars, aka Andrew Nielsen, has been around the block. He's graduating this summer from Stanford University - so you know he's all about California. He's really involved in the indie-rock scene (he samples artists like Piebald and Brand New on some of his songs), but at this point his music strives to be attractive satire, not "top of the charts" blockbuster material. His only real instrument is his Ibook, the laptop in "laptop rap" - he mixes the background track there, and then lays down sick rhymes on top. His song topics are varied but include things like: how NOT punk-rock Hot Topic is ("Hot Topic is not Punk Rock"), how the RIAA doesn't get that downloading is inevitable ("Download this Song"), and how the music industry today is about hot trends and making money instead of actually promoting genuine talent ("Download this Song"). All of which I couldn't agree more with.

But what really sets Lars into his element is his sense of fun. A lot of his songs are just whimsical - this kid loves farting around with all that new-fangled music software. The songs are SO effin' catchy its scary - so I have nothing but good things so say about his influence and prescence in the music business. Go buy a CD now - or else beg me to burn you one.

I'm no live-music afficianado, but I do go to a LOT of shows. You can tell pretty fast who the fakers are and who actually knows what they're doing - and this is the great value of live music: genuinely talented bands can showcase their work and gain street-cred, and the fake ones are quickly revealed as the posers they are. Live music is the ONE level playing field where some pop-punk band with a #1 hit on TRL (*cough All American Rejects are LOSERS cough*) can totally be upstaged by some no-name kids from Iowa - it's important. So naturally, when I'm already familiar with a band's music and then I see them live, it's really interesting to hear how different they are between live & on the album; bands that rely too heavily on studio mixing will suck ass on stage, while bands that master their instruments appear godlike (e.g. Moneen does ALL that kickass psychadellic guitar work LIVE, too! awesome!).

Lars' performance last night was lackluster. It turns out that the downside to making "laptop rap" is that live, he plays the song from the album without the vocals (literally from his IBook), and just sings on top. So it's one dude, with his computer and a microphone...and it sounds really, really canned. He had some stage energy, but it turns out he's a big pudgy (not unlike yours truly) and just doesn't do that much....I'll give it to him that he nailed every word of every rhyme (so far as I could tell) in time, but his format or music doesn't lend itself well to an impressive live performance. The one highlight of the set was when he got the Matches to play as "Hearts that Hate" during the song "signing Emo" - basically it's a song about a shitty emo band and the chorous to the song is a screamy chorous from this ficticious group's hit song....it's pretty funny.

The benefit to that was all the gear for the Matches was already set up, so their set-change was really fast.

the Matches:
I'd forgotten about this band. I know I'd heard of them but I couldn't remember where. They have a few songs on some comp. CDs I have: Take Action vol 3, and the Warped Tour '05 comp. So I knew a few hits....but they're a fairly generic pop-punk band. I listened intently to about 4 soungs before decided that crap wasn't worth my time.... they played a really crisp, synchronized set, their music just didn't seem like anything particularly noteworthy. Sorry if you're a Matches' fan.

So I walked over to the merch table: picked up "the Graduate" (unimpressed as I was with the live performace, I knew he would still sound good on the album), and a t-shirt for Stace. Hope she likes it.

So I'm walking out the door, and Lars is in the parking lot chatting it up with these two girls. Wow. So he shakes my hand and I introduce myself and tell him I agree with what he's saying about the music industry etc and ask him what he's listening to (underground hip-hop like: Sage Francis, Sole, and Dosh....but also I guess he's a Coheed fan....) and I asked him how he's allowed to do stuff like sample Brand New's songs (I guess they have the same label/manager so there's a financial arrangement) and also how he got so much promotion on AP.net (again, the manager got the word out there). He was really nice - very polite. He listened to what I said, made eye contact....very personable. I'd say it was the highlight of the evening, although the highschool girls fawning over him did distract him a bit, he was really nice.

All in all a great evening's entertainment. And I have two more shows to make it to before Stacey comes to town!