Hot Winter Night

I am so stoked that I finally got to see Muhammid Ali. I’ve been jamming their 26Tapes release (more on that tomorrow) bunches, and Little John and Dirty Jeff and I are knuckleheads from back in the day, so I’ve had no excuse for not seeing them sooner. But now that I have, I’m never not seeing them ever again if I can help it. It’s situations like this that make this job so easy. Here I’ve got some dudes I’ve known forevs, and have always been down for the music they’ve made and then WAHBAM! It’s like when the alchemists finally strike aqua vitae. How proud am I of these dudes? Man alive. They are RIPPIN’. It’s like you get some Jesus Lizard and some Sonic Youth and some Dinosaur Jr, and some early Flaming Lips even and throw a Wipers’ cover in there and you just freak out and scream along and forget about hoping for the best because it’s already here. FUCK YEAH. Just walk away. You are permanently rocked. And this is why they make this job easy, you can’t act like I’m just blowing smoke up my friends’ asses, because everyone knows they shit is crucial, yo.

Following Muhammid, were We Landed on the Moon. I wish I had more insight into the context of the how and why of this band being on this bill. Nothing against the band, they just seemed tacked on, and sorely under-promoted. From their myspace it seems they’ve got a decent press force for an unsigned band so I’m imagining a stack of un-circulated handbills lost in a pile of junk mail in someone’s apartment. As for the band itself, they were clean and spunky, an image-ready pop band. They were quite lovely, all around, but perhaps suffered from being an over-the-counter remedy to the gloomies in the wake of Muhammid’s speedball of aural annihilation.

Now, all the flyers said that this was a CD release for Benjamin Wesley Winder, III, and maybe it was due to the fact that I swung by the merch table at the end of the show, but I didn’t see a single copy of said release. I was hoping to get my hands on one, but to no avail. This is the first time I’ve seen BW3 outside of his many outfits, and though miles away from this reference, I was left with notions of Paul Simon’s Graceland and mid-career U2, if only from the world beat leanings of his synth settings. Add Max’s Sax-on-the-Beach blend and you’re left in a froth of urban isolation taking a walk on the mild side of some smooth electronic grooves.

Closing out the night was the debut of the band Houston has been waiting for, Bolt. Parts American Sharks, Monocles, and Black Black Gold, they’re the kind of band you wanna root for like Seth Rogan wooing a 10. Carrying on singer Mike Hardin’s tradition of leading consummate party bands, Bolt were all-in-all great fun. And part of that fun for me was definitely placing the riffs in the songs, where as in execution they are a four piece rock and roll band, they are in result more a akin to a glam rock Girl Talk. They opened with their myspace track “Hot Summer Night” which bounces along like “Personality Crisis” in sensible shoes. And while I could have gone for a bit more theatrics, I can tell that where there are Queen, Mott the Hoople, and Bowie albums, there will be fans spraying these dudes down with beers in the near future. They closed out their set with “The Man Who Couldn’t Save the World” (guys, I’m calling you out on that, too obvs, yo) a noble jaunt into the epic glitter stratosphere with winding guitars and emotive pleas for a life better understood, lyrically delivered in heartbreaking terms, all the while toying with the resigned isolation of Major Tom really making the grade.

Ooooh, and how could I forget Jeoff’s epic bouncing of drunk douche #5392. One minute dude is in faces, next minute dude is on the ground, and approximately .3 seconds later dude is in cuffs. Whoa dude.

So yeah, Friday night at Walter’s was a good good time. But what about Weird Weeds at Sound Exchange? How was that? Bad, dudes, bad. Like, in the Michael Jackson way. The Super intense experimental freak folk droning out to the lonely neon light of the SoundEx “We Buy CDs, LPs” (not tapes no more) sign was one of those mellow crests you find yourself a top of when drifting lazily through the poetic rhythms of life. Tighter than a pair of Cheap Mondays, Weird Weeds at times struck notes of a long forgotten band from the Northeast, VI Foot Sloth, the erratic beats and intently plodding strings sucking you into your mind’s often neglected intellectual pleasure centers until you think there’s no turning back then suddenly you’re awash in the soothing chimes of late 90’s emo guitar (the good kind). It was a great way to spend an evening alone with everyone else. To top it off the female singer told my all time favorite joke about penguins going to the zoo. Bonus.