I'm gonna get shanked out for this one...
Over the last few years, I’ve written many music reviews. And I’ve found, without a doubt, that the most entertaining stories and the wackiest shows generally begin with something untoward happening before I even get NEAR the venue. Last night was a good example of this.
So, while sitting around after dinner at Richmond’s infamous 3rd Street Diner and waiting to see Terminal Ready and The Brides, I was asked by Winny how important and enjoyable, in the grander scheme of my week, talking shit to her could possibly be. Almost halfway through the list of things I enjoy more in my regular week than verbally assaulting her (writing, music, movies, the internet, video games, reading, driving, billiards, masturbation, dvd television, friends and pooing), this crazy old filthy hippie bag lady wanders in from off the streets and interrupts us by walking by the table and exclaiming loud and proud to Winny, “Baby got back!” She then wanders and shambles dirtily to the back of the diner and proceeds to dance…to the songs of silence during those lulls in the jukebox’s random play function.
But she doesn’t quit there, folks. Oh, no. The truly filthy and crazy ones never really do, do they? She wanders back up to the front half of the diner and stands next to our table. The four of us are trying to crawl into our own skins like some sort of fleshy turtles and escape the inevitably ensuing cavalcade of crazy she’s no doubt about to unleash, when she screams OVER our table to the girls behind the bar, “I’m okay, I’ve just been through a really bad experience and I need to relax for a little while…unless I can go out back and smoke my weed I got. NAW! Naw. Naw. I don’t got no weed. I’s just lyin.” Which is kind of amusing, but even moreso with the fact that she’s standing next to our table and shouting over our heads. Because we were the only fucking people in there. Seriously. This isn’t one of those hyperbolic cases where there were seven other people at scattered other tables and booths. Just us. Nobody else. So this froot loop raisin cake decides to stand on the wrong side of us and shout over our heads-shouting loud enough to wake the dead-in this COMPLETELY EMPTY RESTAURANT!
After she wanders back to the ignorable back and does another little jig before sitting down, we resume our conversation. Until the next time she interrupts by shouting, “Jesus! Jesus Christ, almighty! Give me a cheeseburger, Jesus!” Hallelujah.
And what, I ask you, can you follow that kind of entertainment up with? NOTHING but heading on to the show!
Terminal ready opens with a ‘bwonk’ of keyboards and are immediately awash in mediocrity. Not just the normal kind of mediocrity, but the kind that engenders phrases like, ‘a poor man’s Cruxshadows,’ or, ‘kinda like Type O Negative, but without all the penis,’ or even, ‘Not wholly unlike [insert faceless interchangeable band name here] but without all that pesky Talent getting in the way.’ Hmm…perhaps that was a little meaner than I intended it…they’re not especially BAD, they’re just REALLY mediocre. Mediocre in an extraordinary way.
Their dueling keyboardists tend toward a general doctrine of long ‘bwing’-y notes with hard treble kicks from the drum machine. The guitars grind and drone and whine with uncoordinated feedback. But these are background instruments to the true centre stage: the vocals. Stu, the lead singer, is forever aiming low on the register and shooting his mood gun full-bore like a fucking champ; very clearly reaching for that Peter Murphy/Peter Steele/Cruxshadows sound of ominous emotive gloom. Holding notes low and long and spooooooooky, he fires for effect. That sort of shit where every line is, “Eeeeeeeevery tiiiiiime Iiiiiii look insiiiii-yiiiide I…’ and then insert some random metaphor comparing love to pain, life to something broken and beauty to torture. Yeah…that old shoe…yeah…again.
So, between songs, they have nothing better to say than to talk about the hot girls in the crowd and crack inside jokes with inside jokers scattered throughout the first row of the crowd-those guys who are clearly here on the sole basis of having got in for free on the guest list and who all know each other. Admittedly, most of the people in the room know which one Tank is when they crack jokes about him, but hiding behind keyboard number two and the big, blue bubble butt of the lead singer, we can’t all see that he’s drag dressed as the fugliest girl in God’s golden firmament of creation.
The third, fifth and seventh songs are more screaming and less spooooooooky. As changes go, this is no more welcome than learning that your downstairs neighbor with the yappy Chihuahua wiener dog with the inferiority complex and the astonishing superpower of NEVER sleeping has opted to replace it with an insomniac bellowing black Labrador with paranoid schizophrenia.
And the shit keeps on coming. Instead of trying to charm the room out of its collective knickers and generally using the stage as his own private Toolin’ For Anus soapbox, Stu has decided to cut through the red tape of bullshit and asks the unenthusiastic crowd for a handjob. All the cheering and acquiescent respondents are boys.
Ooh! Lookout, kids! A song about how Jesus is Lies! From a goth band! No shit. Rest easy, America; originality really IS alive and well in all strata of society. Nothing to fear there. Art really isn’t dead. It really hasn’t all been done before.
He follows that absolute darling little Peach of a song by pointing out individual girls in the crowd with big tits and reaching DEEP into his satchel of chat-up lines for such winsome gems as, “Now those are HUGE!” And yet…I know with all the dire certainty with which I live, breathe, think and write (and of these things, the most certain is writing) that he’s had a girlfriend more recently than me. Fuck.
The Brides:
One of the guys setting up the stage has a black bowling shirt with a pink leopard print collar. And THAT is how I know the Brides are going to fucking rock. When they start, this initial surety is neither admonished nor left disappointed. They scream starting with some hot n’ howling rockin’ and follow it up with a little rockin’. This, then, segues smooth into serious rockin’ which they then change up and begin rockin’ with a generous side dish of rockin’.
It isn’t just rock. It isn’t just rock & roll, for that matter. The first two songs are that Bouncing Souls kind of rock that makes you throw your arms around a stranger’s shoulders and go “whoaaaaa-aaoh!” right along with the band. Every song is a dirtyrock fighting anthem of disaffected youth percolating in their own pants with unspent fury and directionless energy. Many bands, in trying to harness that hyperkinetic sorcerous ether will find it gets out of their hands and drags them along into aimless aggression and mires them in a toneless chaos. Others fall short and make thinly scene-themed and poorly disguised bubblegum pop. Bands like The Brides manage to grab it by its big, blue gonads and tell that ornery fucker which way to go to find relief, release and recreation.
Reincarnated Ramones with a twist of glam. Lou Reed on speed. Elvis Presley in a studded belt. Tiger Army before the pink flag. And faithful to the occasional sounds of Faith No More. The Brides stare down the unfortunate barrel of that withered old gray pecker we call the Richmond scene and go to work. They stroke and breathe life into it with the feather fingered finesse of a hundred-dollar hooker and coax a half-hard, shriveled response from even the most jaded members of the crowd.
They stretch their cool glam cat gut across us, draw their deadly bows and make the crowd sing soulful. They work us like an accordion, squeezing every last droning drop of dance out of the kids on the floor. The ones who would normally act loftily removed from it are bopping and dipping, dancing whatever way they know how. And for the perennial spastic squirmers like Dave, Dana, Kay and the Wills, this is a stamped & signed excuse to cut the fuck loose in unbridled expressionism. Fucking Glorious.
They even let the bassist (bloke in the pink collard from before) sing a few songs. Now, normally, that would be like saying, “they even let Ringo sing a couple songs,” but they carry it off flawlessly. The sudden and total change in style and sound ends up being an unexpectedly welcome change of pace. And when the girl on the keyboards takes center stage and sings one, it takes me right back to that Eyeliners show last year. And it was comforting to note that even in the normally egomaniacal setting of a glam band, the lead singer and guitarist was willing to completely back out and just chill on the side of the stage, doing the bass thing of generally staying invisible, rather than one of those lead singers who will, by his grace, PERMIT one of the other band members to sing a song but will still horn in on the spotlight the whole time.
Not only did I get my seven bucks worth, but was entirely happy to plunk down another fourteen for The Brides full-length 2004 self-titled. I didn’t notice Terminal Ready selling any CDs, but then…I wasn’t exactly looking too hard. Mediocrity is not the crowbar which will pry this fool from his filthy American monies.
© All material copyright 2006, Joshua C.
Addendum: Steve, you may feel free to use any and all of this article on the Sacrosanct Myspace Page, but only under the following conditions: Use the whole thing. Make sure my name is on it. Link to my livejournal and myspace. Don't forget the copyright information. Forward me any death threats and hate mail generated by Charlottevillians who want to shiv my pale ass for having taken liberties with their native sons. But don't post my e-mail address.
Oh, and somebody mail a copy of this to Dana and to Kay. Maybe link to it from the Sacro livejournal community as well.
So, while sitting around after dinner at Richmond’s infamous 3rd Street Diner and waiting to see Terminal Ready and The Brides, I was asked by Winny how important and enjoyable, in the grander scheme of my week, talking shit to her could possibly be. Almost halfway through the list of things I enjoy more in my regular week than verbally assaulting her (writing, music, movies, the internet, video games, reading, driving, billiards, masturbation, dvd television, friends and pooing), this crazy old filthy hippie bag lady wanders in from off the streets and interrupts us by walking by the table and exclaiming loud and proud to Winny, “Baby got back!” She then wanders and shambles dirtily to the back of the diner and proceeds to dance…to the songs of silence during those lulls in the jukebox’s random play function.
But she doesn’t quit there, folks. Oh, no. The truly filthy and crazy ones never really do, do they? She wanders back up to the front half of the diner and stands next to our table. The four of us are trying to crawl into our own skins like some sort of fleshy turtles and escape the inevitably ensuing cavalcade of crazy she’s no doubt about to unleash, when she screams OVER our table to the girls behind the bar, “I’m okay, I’ve just been through a really bad experience and I need to relax for a little while…unless I can go out back and smoke my weed I got. NAW! Naw. Naw. I don’t got no weed. I’s just lyin.” Which is kind of amusing, but even moreso with the fact that she’s standing next to our table and shouting over our heads. Because we were the only fucking people in there. Seriously. This isn’t one of those hyperbolic cases where there were seven other people at scattered other tables and booths. Just us. Nobody else. So this froot loop raisin cake decides to stand on the wrong side of us and shout over our heads-shouting loud enough to wake the dead-in this COMPLETELY EMPTY RESTAURANT!
After she wanders back to the ignorable back and does another little jig before sitting down, we resume our conversation. Until the next time she interrupts by shouting, “Jesus! Jesus Christ, almighty! Give me a cheeseburger, Jesus!” Hallelujah.
And what, I ask you, can you follow that kind of entertainment up with? NOTHING but heading on to the show!
Terminal ready opens with a ‘bwonk’ of keyboards and are immediately awash in mediocrity. Not just the normal kind of mediocrity, but the kind that engenders phrases like, ‘a poor man’s Cruxshadows,’ or, ‘kinda like Type O Negative, but without all the penis,’ or even, ‘Not wholly unlike [insert faceless interchangeable band name here] but without all that pesky Talent getting in the way.’ Hmm…perhaps that was a little meaner than I intended it…they’re not especially BAD, they’re just REALLY mediocre. Mediocre in an extraordinary way.
Their dueling keyboardists tend toward a general doctrine of long ‘bwing’-y notes with hard treble kicks from the drum machine. The guitars grind and drone and whine with uncoordinated feedback. But these are background instruments to the true centre stage: the vocals. Stu, the lead singer, is forever aiming low on the register and shooting his mood gun full-bore like a fucking champ; very clearly reaching for that Peter Murphy/Peter Steele/Cruxshadows sound of ominous emotive gloom. Holding notes low and long and spooooooooky, he fires for effect. That sort of shit where every line is, “Eeeeeeeevery tiiiiiime Iiiiiii look insiiiii-yiiiide I…’ and then insert some random metaphor comparing love to pain, life to something broken and beauty to torture. Yeah…that old shoe…yeah…again.
So, between songs, they have nothing better to say than to talk about the hot girls in the crowd and crack inside jokes with inside jokers scattered throughout the first row of the crowd-those guys who are clearly here on the sole basis of having got in for free on the guest list and who all know each other. Admittedly, most of the people in the room know which one Tank is when they crack jokes about him, but hiding behind keyboard number two and the big, blue bubble butt of the lead singer, we can’t all see that he’s drag dressed as the fugliest girl in God’s golden firmament of creation.
The third, fifth and seventh songs are more screaming and less spooooooooky. As changes go, this is no more welcome than learning that your downstairs neighbor with the yappy Chihuahua wiener dog with the inferiority complex and the astonishing superpower of NEVER sleeping has opted to replace it with an insomniac bellowing black Labrador with paranoid schizophrenia.
And the shit keeps on coming. Instead of trying to charm the room out of its collective knickers and generally using the stage as his own private Toolin’ For Anus soapbox, Stu has decided to cut through the red tape of bullshit and asks the unenthusiastic crowd for a handjob. All the cheering and acquiescent respondents are boys.
Ooh! Lookout, kids! A song about how Jesus is Lies! From a goth band! No shit. Rest easy, America; originality really IS alive and well in all strata of society. Nothing to fear there. Art really isn’t dead. It really hasn’t all been done before.
He follows that absolute darling little Peach of a song by pointing out individual girls in the crowd with big tits and reaching DEEP into his satchel of chat-up lines for such winsome gems as, “Now those are HUGE!” And yet…I know with all the dire certainty with which I live, breathe, think and write (and of these things, the most certain is writing) that he’s had a girlfriend more recently than me. Fuck.
The Brides:
One of the guys setting up the stage has a black bowling shirt with a pink leopard print collar. And THAT is how I know the Brides are going to fucking rock. When they start, this initial surety is neither admonished nor left disappointed. They scream starting with some hot n’ howling rockin’ and follow it up with a little rockin’. This, then, segues smooth into serious rockin’ which they then change up and begin rockin’ with a generous side dish of rockin’.
It isn’t just rock. It isn’t just rock & roll, for that matter. The first two songs are that Bouncing Souls kind of rock that makes you throw your arms around a stranger’s shoulders and go “whoaaaaa-aaoh!” right along with the band. Every song is a dirtyrock fighting anthem of disaffected youth percolating in their own pants with unspent fury and directionless energy. Many bands, in trying to harness that hyperkinetic sorcerous ether will find it gets out of their hands and drags them along into aimless aggression and mires them in a toneless chaos. Others fall short and make thinly scene-themed and poorly disguised bubblegum pop. Bands like The Brides manage to grab it by its big, blue gonads and tell that ornery fucker which way to go to find relief, release and recreation.
Reincarnated Ramones with a twist of glam. Lou Reed on speed. Elvis Presley in a studded belt. Tiger Army before the pink flag. And faithful to the occasional sounds of Faith No More. The Brides stare down the unfortunate barrel of that withered old gray pecker we call the Richmond scene and go to work. They stroke and breathe life into it with the feather fingered finesse of a hundred-dollar hooker and coax a half-hard, shriveled response from even the most jaded members of the crowd.
They stretch their cool glam cat gut across us, draw their deadly bows and make the crowd sing soulful. They work us like an accordion, squeezing every last droning drop of dance out of the kids on the floor. The ones who would normally act loftily removed from it are bopping and dipping, dancing whatever way they know how. And for the perennial spastic squirmers like Dave, Dana, Kay and the Wills, this is a stamped & signed excuse to cut the fuck loose in unbridled expressionism. Fucking Glorious.
They even let the bassist (bloke in the pink collard from before) sing a few songs. Now, normally, that would be like saying, “they even let Ringo sing a couple songs,” but they carry it off flawlessly. The sudden and total change in style and sound ends up being an unexpectedly welcome change of pace. And when the girl on the keyboards takes center stage and sings one, it takes me right back to that Eyeliners show last year. And it was comforting to note that even in the normally egomaniacal setting of a glam band, the lead singer and guitarist was willing to completely back out and just chill on the side of the stage, doing the bass thing of generally staying invisible, rather than one of those lead singers who will, by his grace, PERMIT one of the other band members to sing a song but will still horn in on the spotlight the whole time.
Not only did I get my seven bucks worth, but was entirely happy to plunk down another fourteen for The Brides full-length 2004 self-titled. I didn’t notice Terminal Ready selling any CDs, but then…I wasn’t exactly looking too hard. Mediocrity is not the crowbar which will pry this fool from his filthy American monies.
© All material copyright 2006, Joshua C.
Addendum: Steve, you may feel free to use any and all of this article on the Sacrosanct Myspace Page, but only under the following conditions: Use the whole thing. Make sure my name is on it. Link to my livejournal and myspace. Don't forget the copyright information. Forward me any death threats and hate mail generated by Charlottevillians who want to shiv my pale ass for having taken liberties with their native sons. But don't post my e-mail address.
Oh, and somebody mail a copy of this to Dana and to Kay. Maybe link to it from the Sacro livejournal community as well.