Concert Review: Real Estate, The Twerps, and Ghosty at the Bottleneck

Larryville scenesters turned up in droves last night for the Real Estate/The Twerps/Ghosty show at the Bottleneck.  Here's our take on the proceedings:

Ghosty:

Ghosty's new album is terrific and the songs sound great live. We've seen them twice recently and the vocals were crisp and clear both times (take a cue, every other fucking band we see!).   Like numerous other indie-pop bands, Ghosty has a knack for making loneliness and isolation very, very pretty  (sample song titles from the new album:  "Long-Suffering Soul"; "Joy In My Sorrow").   Our personal favorite is "You Shut Me Out," which adds a nice little dose of bitterness and some hot guitar licks to the poppy proceedings ("I bought it, I bought it, I always buy that shit.").    Later in the evening, we chatted for a bit with long-ago Ghosty member Richard Gintowt (now in Hidden Pictures), who'd been to all of Ghosty's recent record-release shows and vouched for the Record Bar gig as the best of the lot, because the band was at their most drunk and relaxed.

Get the new album  here .

The Twerps:

Tucked between two ultra-polished sets, Melbourne's The Twerps were a bit ramshackle and ragged, but charmingly so.   The vocals were fuzzy (well-nigh unintelligible) but the jangly guitar sounds and fun harmonies kept the crowd engaged throughout.  In a recent interview with The Daily Texan, the band states: "We just want to sound like the Go-Betweens, basically."  But you'll be reminded of a dozen other bands too  (we ended up, oddly enough, reminded of Marshall Crenshaw).

Real Estate:

Live, Real Estate stretches out their short and pretty songs to about twice the usual length, not in a noodly jam band sort of way but rather maintaining the languorous feel of the songs with extended swirling guitars.  Even from up close, the lyrics were lost in the mix half the time, but of course the scenesters knew all the songs and probably convinced themselves they could actually hear the lyrics.  BARRR walked by and shared his take:  "Better than I thought, but one needs to be exactly the right amount of stoned or drunk to get it."  Luckily, we were just the right amount of drunk at this point.  We dug it.  But was Up the Academy's Adam feeling the love, we asked him at the bar.  The reply:  "Not tonight.  But I'd totally listen to this at home."  Fun and quirky moment:  a short take on the Kids in the Hall theme song.  Why not? 

Favorite conversations of the night:

Between the first two sets, we chatted with a local comedian (whose name sadly escapes us now) and asked her to tell us one of her jokes.  She shared a delightful tale about using John Waters' Pink Flamingos as a "backdrop to getting laid," only to find that her girlfriend "came up for air" during the singing asshole scene and simply couldn't proceed at that point: "we didn't talk for like six months."   We definitely want to see this person perform at the Jackpot's Joke Night!

We also chatted with our buddies over I Heart Local Music about our all-time favorite Bottleneck shows (and considered a future collaborative blogging endeavor to chat more about them).