Friday/February/26
The Strange Boys are from Austin, and now feature Jenna Thornhill on sax.
Taken by Trees’ Victoria Bergsman mourns the end of trout season.
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The Strange Boys at the Echo
In the snake pit of a song, "Laughing at Sex, Not Her," from the Strange Boys' new album, Be Brave (In the Red), singer Ryan Sambol begins the narrative while lying on a couch, where he's drifting off to sleep. In the other room, though, two of his friends are having sex, and unsuccessfully trying to be quiet. As the music below, a whispering guitar-and-drum moan that suggests a spooky Cramps or Link Wray track, supports him, the singer wonders on the pair's relationship: "I don't know if they love each other for sure/It sure sounds like they do." We learn all this in the first minute of the song, and you start to wonder, could Sambol, with his penchant for economy and wry humor, be the rocking reincarnation of Raymond Carver? Back on the couch, he smiles and compares sex to laughter: "You do it differently with different people/And sometimes you feel sick after." Sambol is only 20 years old, has a cocky, Dylanesque creak in his voice, and already is one of my favorite songwriters. By the end of the story, we've learned, in an internal dialogue to the guy, that "I used to be you/And I've slept with her too" — and the sex sounded very different. There's a dissertation in these three minutes, so rich is the material, and it's a mere one of a dozen nearly perfect songs on Be Brave, a loose, raw, classically designed garage-rock album with the swagger of the Rolling Stones circa 1966 and the fuck-you confidence of a band whose members, just two albums into their "career," look like kids but act like superstars. Strange Boys recently added a girl to their lineup, former Mika Miko and Silver Daggers saxophonist Jenna Thornhill, who blows wildly and adds a different kind of cockiness. Don't miss this show, because next year they'll be at a bigger venue, and the year after that you'll start lying and saying you saw them at the Echo even if you didn't. (Randall Roberts)
The Haters, Sissy Spacek, Gerritt Wittmer and Paul Knowles, AMK at the Smell
Fine buncha screech and related-type experimental stuff from some real stalwarts: Revered veteran sound artistes the Haters started in the early '90s as a punk band but, under the fearless vision of founder-leader (and professional-wrestling fan) GX Jupitter-Larsen, lost interest in all that and segued into making noise, performance art and conceptual actions where the noise/sound/not-music and visuals and process are all squished together to create a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk. Several overamplified machines get paired with lots of grinding and smashing of things, and the group wishes to emphasize that this is not noise-rock or noise-music or noise-anything — it's noise. Very, very loud Sissy Spacek features local noise hero John Wiese, and he and his chums often make a hellish grindcore spiked with a billion artfully spliced samples, several screams and, well, more noise. Also Oakland's sometimes-subtler noise/process duo Gerritt Wittmer and Paul Knowles, and multi-turntable/flexi-disc madness courtesy AMK. (John Payne)
Clorox Girls at the Redwood Bar & Grill
Like Barenaked Ladies and the Violent Femmes, the Portland band Clorox Girls isn't really composed of women. The punk-pop trio also don't bleach their hair blond, but they are named after an old Redd Kross song. Clorox Girls claims to be influenced largely by such early L.A. punks as the Urinals, the Controllers, Angry Samoans and the Dickies, and the group has a fast, flippantly frenetic yet poppy sound that's untouched by the rage of 1980s hardcore and the careerist slickness of modern corporate-punk outfits. (I also detect a bit of the rampant cheekiness of late-'70s British punks like the Adverts and Eater.) Of course, these Girls don't possess the Urinals' innate gift for arty experimentation or the Dickies' ruthlessly extreme satire, but their most recent CD, J'aime les Filles (BYO Records), is still a catchy collection of exuberant tunes, like "Dreaming of St. Kiley" and a cover of Lio's French hit "Le Banana Split." Also at Alex's Bar, Sat. (Falling James)
Memory Tapes at Spaceland
Sure, for dogged followers of up-and-coming music, it seems like the dam's broken on Lake Chillwave — a mysterious, haze-covered recreation destination where kids in plastic sunglasses gather to trade synthesizer secrets and sun-damaged cassettes from the '80s. But so far, from Neon Indian to Nite Jewel, not one of the burgeoning genre's scrappy newcomers has struck a bum note. Memory Tapes is the most up-to-date alias of Dayve Hawk, a 20-something stay-at-home dad who calls rural southern New Jersey home. His debut album, Seek Magic, subdues its New Order–like synth-pop leanings with a Fever Ray–like haze, and punches up the results with drums that sound cribbed from Paula Abdul's early oeuvre. Having a hard time believing that's actually a good thing? Hawk's remix résumé should allay any fears; the dude's been hired to rework everyone from Yeasayer and Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Gucci Mane and Britney Spears. Memory Tapes doesn't tour often, so don't miss this prime opportunity to, ahem, ride the wave. (Chris Martins)
