The Golden Grass at Mercury Lounge

The Golden Grass (the band) can be found on Facebook.  I'm not telling you where to find the other kind.

Posted: 10/14/2013 at 11:08pm     Tags: Mercury Lounge  The Golden Grass 

Hanni El Khatib at The Knitting Factory

Hanni El Khatib seems to have a greaser following. There were some really retro outfits in the audience. Cat's eye glasses on the ladies and pompadours... on the ladies too, actually. Funny, I didn't think that Hanni El Khatib's sound was so specifically 50s-ish, and it's certainly not rockabilly. The fans may be trying hard to be retro but the band not so much.

I think it is telling that Hanni El Khatib covered a Cramps song. You know how The Cramps are claimed by both the punk and rockabilly crowds but are really in an insane category of their own? Likewise I do not think it is quite right to call Hanni El Khatib 50's or greaser rock. Their sound is vaguely bluesy, more old-school than new-school, but in the end they just play rock-n-roll. You don't have to be into the 50's to enjoy it, that's for sure. Perhaps it is also telling that the pompadours were very much in the minority in this audience.

Posted: 10/13/2013 at 4:26pm     Tags: Hanni El Khatib  The Knitting Factory 

Slothrust at The Knitting Factory

Why do they always turn the lights way down when I try to take pictures of this band? Ugh.

Anyway, Slothrust call themselves a "blues-influenced grunge" band. They do bring back vague memories of the 90s so I'm buying the grunge part, but I'm not so sure about the blues part. The singing often sounds like plain-old talking, which if anything seems closer to the folk tradition than blues. What it really reminds me of though is Beat Happening. If you can imagine the music of, say, L7 paired with a singing style which alternates between L7 (or 7 Year Bitch?) and Beat Happening (or the Minutemen?) then I think you've got it.

Posted: 10/6/2013 at 6:14pm     Tags: red  Slothrust  The Knitting Factory 

The V!brators at Trash Bar

Apparently my web hosting company will not let me call this band by their real name. I'm not kidding! They don't like the word "Vibrators". I had to trick it into letting me type that word in this comment right here and it won't accept it at all as a tag name. Some sort of weird anti-porn filter? Oh well, I guess I have to call them "The V!brators" from now on. Just pretend that exclamation point is picture of a little vibrator.

Posted: 10/6/2013 at 4:36pm     Tags: The V!brators  Trash Bar 

Fucked Up at le Poisson Rouge

Strangely I don't feel the need to write much about this band. They started with a 10+ minute artsy-hard rock song which seemed to catch the audience off guard a bit. Then 45 minutes or so of the chaos pictured above. Dang, my knees took a week to recover from this one.

Posted: 9/29/2013 at 8:53pm     Tags: Fucked Up  le Poisson Rouge