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Showing posts with label Mars Bar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mars Bar. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Wait... what?
While the details are slow to reveal themselves, keep an eye to the RadGoat page, which is working to keep all of the shows booked throughout January and February alive. The shows aren't going to be cancelled, just relocated
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Friday, December 7, 2012
Sioux City Pete and The Beggars
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So begins my first experience with Sioux City Pete and The Beggars... and it couldn't have been more accurate. They took the stage minus one member (Amanda, one of the guitarists, had a stand-in for the night, stepping up after only one practice) and gear fighting them every step of the way.
I'm sure the band wasn't thrilled about these troubles (talking to Pete after the show, it became very clear that The Beggars do not cancel shows), but from the floor, as an audience, the whole thing was heightened by the threat that anything could blow up at any minute. This was a completely off-the-leash, blood & sweat rock 'n' roll show....I get the feeling that Sioux City Pete and The Beggars are probably always playing with all meters in the red, but this is the particular show I saw, and the whole thing was fraught with danger. We had been warned: it was all real. It was exhilarating.
And I'm going to ditch that whole "Garage Rock" label, too-- while that descriptor was built to describe a stripped-down, no frills style of rock band (which The Beggars certainly are), it has mostly been appropriated by bands like The Hives or The White Stripes... faux rebellion in matching outfits. I wouldn't lump these guys into a category that contains The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. To me, that's bad comedy; Sioux City Pete and The Beggars are apocalyptic.
Reality is a sticking point for a rock 'n' roll band... more often than not, bands claiming straight ahead rock play music like they have to go home and finish their term papers: fresh scrubbed, perfectly coiffed, polite bands with the pretense of "rocking." Sioux City Pete and The Beggars don't play rock like they've put on personae for the night-- they play like their lives depend on it. There's no ironic aloofness, no poseurdom: when they rock, I believe them.
Pete fronts the band, commanding the group's only vocal mic and playing a well-beaten Telecaster (with and without slide)-- he took the stage in a bluesman's suit coat, but, pouring sweat, played most of the show shirtless. Ana locked down the bass with an awesome, flatwound-strung Thunderbird, and, as the show went on, the two of them hit the floor... seriously, a knock-down, drag-out kind of show. (I never really got a good picture of Ana, which is a damn shame. There are actual, good pictures of the band on their Facebook page.)Anthony plays drums in the manner befitting The Beggars: he beats them within an inch of their collective lives. His style is so completely, incredibly unrestrained that, while he isn't that well represented in my pictures, there are videos of Sioux City Pete and The Beggars that are just him. Seriously: Anthony is so captivating behind the kit, playing like he's about to destroy the whole world, that you can find videos that never look away from the drummer.
This is probably poor reporting on my part, but I don't have the second guitarist's name. He was in a tough spot, filling in with the band with minimal preparation, but he certainly got the job done; if the band hadn't spotlit him for helping them out, I wouldn't have known he wasn't a permanent member.
This band takes rock 'n' roll and completely throws caution to the wind-- they're not here to reinvent rock, they're not trying to repackage it, prettify it, update it, or sell it to a wider demographic, they're just here to rock. They have albums available, but I'm anxiously looking forward to seeing them blow down another club.
Sioux City Pete and The Beggars on Facebook
Friday, November 30, 2012
Barefoot Barnacle
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It is sort of funny that the first time I saw Barefoot Barnacle was at the Blue Moon (featuring Seattle's worst PA) was also the only time I ever saw them with a vocalist-- Barefoot was an instrumental band before that, and they've been instrumental ever since-- was in the one place that can't handle vocals. Go figure.
I do feel a little odd writing up two technical, instrumental, metal bands at a Mars Bar Radgoat Friday in a row... but Barefoot Barnacle have been a long time coming. In line for a beer at the bar, the conversation was “This is the most underrated band in Seattle. They're like Cephalic Carnage mixed with Mr. Bungle.”
I hear some Cynic and Obscura-era Gorguts in there, too, but that might just be me.Barnacle play a constantly-shifting style of hallucinogenic metal-- their song titles often have a nautical theme, and you could call a few of their pieces demented tech-metal sea shanties. With Doug and Jorge's guitars echoing, chorusing, and wah-ing through the a song's trippier sections, and Alex's fretless bass sliding chords around, Barnacle can make a club go a little... er... "swimmy."
Those are just their driftier parts, though; the main body of Barefoot Barnacle's songs are charging, thrashing, and heavy as hell. The riffs can grind, but they're full of big, dissonant chords and off-kilter intervals-- they write moshable songs, but they're not a band that just moves power chords around the neck. Similarly, Jon Z is not just putting down 16th notes in double-kick: if you listen to these songs (and yes, you should listen to these songs), even the kick patterns can have triplets breaking up the beat.
The band is excellent at keeping the audience engaged with an instrumental band-- they volley parts between instruments, call-and-response style, setting up parts before they tear into them. They'll switch times at the drop of a hat, shifting gears from breakneck technical craziness to circle-pit break... and the breaks can even come with choreography.
You read that right: choreography. There are some legitimate stage moves that occur during specific Barnacle songs. Nothing to be taken too seriously... quite the opposite: they're being funny... but it is part of the show.
And that's part of it: Barefoot Barnacle is funny. You're going to get a show when you go to see them live, and they're always kind of fucking with the crowd. Once, at a Metal Monday, as Jon Z and Alex (often shirtless, or less) lost more clothes, Jorge yanked off what turned out to be velcro'd stripper pants, and played the rest of the show in a banana-hammock (seriously-- that happened). They opened a show at The Octagon once with a cover of Salt 'N' Peppa's "Push It."
This show was the day after Thanksgiving, and Barnacle decided that "turkey day" should be followed by "geoduck day," which came with an audience participation chant: "dig-a-duck, dig-a-duck, dig-a-geoduck, dig-a-duck, dig-a-geoduck" (well, something close to that... I don't quite remember how it all goes) which Barnacle matched with a riff.
They killed it, too-- I'm sure most of the country was dealing with a tryptophan overdose, and the crowd was a little sedentary-- but Barefoot Barnacle played an awesome, energetic, wild set. Unlike some of the bands I write up, Barnacle exists on the web and you can (and should) buy their CD, but you should still see them live when you can: they play hard, they're never a boring show, and pretty much anything can happen when they're on stage.
Barefoot Barnacle on ReverbNation
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Lb.!
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Lb.! are built to cover a lot of ground, especially for an instrumental two-piece. Ryan's 8-string guitar is split between two amps--
a guitar amp/cab and a bass amp/cab-- with a variety of pitch pedals to expand his frequency range. David's drum kit is two kick/snare setups at ninety degrees from one another, letting him play tight, focused blasts, shift on the drum throne, and dig in for huge, heavy beats 
(seriously... can you believe the size of that second kick?) David rotating between the fast side of his kit to the heavy side is a lot of fun to watch throughout a Lb.! set... I've never seen a drummer set up this way before.I saw Lb.! as the opening band for one of the Mars Bar's Radgoat Fridays, and they slayed the crowd. They claim grind and sludge in their description, and they slip between blistering, breakneck grindcore and heavy, stomping grooves effortlessly. As an instrumental band, Lb.! keeps the crowd's attention with a combination of "can you believe that just happened?" wizardry and crushing, headbanging riffs. With David cranking out blinding, mathy, intricate beats, Ryan grinds out complicated riffs that bend, slide, and lock in on the complex rhythms, sometimes using tapping to play multi-octave rhythms across the 8-string guitar (rhythm-tapping, not Steve Vai meedley-meedly-me). Then the groove shifts, Ryan drops to heavy riffs on his low strings, David switches over to his massive kick, snare, and the audience falls in line with the monstrous sound chugging through the room.
Lb.! are fairly extreme; their shifting rhythms could leave calculus majors scratching their heads, certain to alienate patrons who come to shows for AC/DC, straight ahead bar rock-- but they're infinitely rewarding for people who want the extreme. They've got technical math grindcore lunacy and heavy sludge in equal measure, they're tons of fun for anyone who can keep up... but they're not big on internet presence. If you want to hear Lb.!, you have to go see them live (I'll list all of their shows on the calendar at the bottom of this page)-- then you can add yourself to the ranks of people who invariably start the next day with "I saw Lb.! last night... you have got to check these guys out."
Lb.! on Facebook
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
The Mars Bar
For the record: the food at Cafe Venus is pretty good. They have traditional bar food as well as a lot of vegetarian/vegan options.The venue itself is fairly small and intimate, with a mid-size stage (much improved from the first time we played here) and a solid PA (appropriate for the size of the venue). Bands split the door, and there are tables across from the stage for merch.
Not unlike the 2 Bit's Monday Metal Madness, the Mars Bar is currently hosting RadGoat Fridays, which is hosted by ubik.s Michelle, and has been building up Mars Bar Fridays as a punk and metal event night in town. Saturdays are being booked by Daswasup GIG, setting up a more garage-style night, and giving the Mars Bar a solid lineup.
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