Rooftop Vigilantes: The Vigilantes have been mentioned on the LC perhaps more than any other local band besides the Transmittens but, believe it or not, this was our first time to actually witness them live. So, do they deserve their hype? Yes. Would they be twice as good if they turned the amps down from 14 to 11? Also yes. We hope to catch them sometime in their natural habitat (the Replay), as the cavernous (and largely unpopulated at that early hour) Liberty Hall didn't do justice to their onslaught. But we're rarely out and about during their normal 1:17 am slot at the Replay.
Best Coast: The Pitchfork buzz-band drew a large crowd to Liberty for their 7:00 set and, while most of Garage Fest was a sausage-fest, as the kids say, quite a few ladies showed up to hear the dreamy pop of Bethany Cosentino and her lyrics that sound like a teen girl's diary (crushes and kittycats!). Bethany was charmed by a nine-year old girl rocking on the front row--(Chip: "This event was all-ages? Anybody letting a child free to roam around with people like King Khan should be turned in to Social Services!")--and late in the set the girl was lifted on stage to join the band on tambourine (Richard: "Her poor tambourine skills detracted from my enjoyment of the set, but at the same time I was enchanted by the spontaneity and adorableness of the moment, until my cynical friend King Tosser called the girl a 'convenient prop' and possibly even a 'plant.'").
Down the way at the Granada, we caught most of a set from Hunx and his Punx, where a moderate crowd of hipsters cheered the gay antics of the band, whose schtick is putting a homoerotic spin on standard garage-rock girl-group tropes. Betweens songs, Hunx told us stories about shopping at TJ Maxx and showed us his ass at one point.
Chip: "What? It never occurred to me that Hunx was gay. But in retrospect I guess that explained a lot of this performance."
Back at Liberty, Richard, who is a sucker for technical proficiency, enjoyed rocking out with the blues-based garage of the Greenhornes. But his companions, who prefer their garage rock a little more "sloppy," soon led us toward the evening's highlight, King Khan and the Shrines.
With his horn-y band and on-stage dancing girl, King Khan finally brought the dance party that Garage Fest was needing. Sounding like some unholy soul-shouting mix of James Brown and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Khan led us all at one point on an ultra-lenthy sing-along chorus of "She's fat, she's ugly, and I really really love her / She's fat, she's ugly, and I really really love her."
Our feminist readers: "If you were over twelve and singing along, then fuck you. And we saw a lot of you twenty-something hipster chicks singing along. Guess what? You are traitors to your gender."
Final verdict for GarageFest: four out of four PBR's (and this was our first time witnessing the new PBR-tallboy bar in the Jackpot: brilliant!). We don't think it's an exaggeration to call last night the hippest event in Larryville history.
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At the end of yesterday's 55-7 Jayhawk massacre, Baylor fans began chanting "Kansas high school" at our beleaguered Hawks.
Chip: "I was shouting the same thing at my television. And worse. Much worse."
1 comment:
I kinda wanted to beat all the hipster parents who brought their little darlings to the rock shows without hearing protection. Kudos to the one parent I saw whose kid's ears were protected.
Other than that, it was fun to walk the streets and see so many scruffy people scaring the usual weekend crowd. The music wasn't bad, either.
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