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Tonight's show is a Honeypump event in a rather odd, though spacious, venue, with the inauspicious start time of 7 p.m. As a result, I arrive just in time for the last half of Badman's last song. They had a drummer and a separate percussionist with pipes and other miscellaneous stuff to beat on, and I'm sorry to have missed them. The half-song I caught had an oddly western feel.
Paper Thin Stages start out with an instrumental, which is beautiful and weird. The guitar is mixed a bit low tonight, and once they add vocals it can get hard to hear the some of the details of what it's doing. (It's very detailed, in a Sonic-Youth-flow-of-timbre sort of way.) Fortunately, the rhythm section is really excellent, with big, thick, chord-heavy bass parts and drumming that's quick and precise but also really advanced, so there's plenty here to hold my attention. They close with my favorite, "Lucius! Boone!" with its odd semi-audible spoken word rant section, bizarrely compelling for all that it's entirely incomprehensible.
Clickers' set is a bit odd tonight. Mike seems a bit more restrained than he might normally be in front of such a familiar and loving crowd; I happen to know that his parents are in the audience, and it might be kind of difficult to really cut loose and shout, "I was screwing you, but you were really screwing me!" in front of your mom. Matt, in fact, pauses to look chastened and apologize after yelling "Fuck!" at one point. For all this (and the really funny moment during one of the what'll-we-play-next negotiations when Matt proposes a song they've already played tonight), they sound great. Yeah, they sort of careen wildly through their set, but that's usually the case. There are some extra-nifty variations in the guitar patterns tonight, at least one of which sounds like it might have been a mistake that they decided to explore rather than try to fix.
Night Rally also start out with some wild careening, although it's rather more literal than metaphorical. I really enjoy Devin's onstage (such as it is; there is, in fact, a stage in this room, but all the bands have set up in front of it and played surrounded by audience on three sides) antics, but tonight they kind of get in the way of the music, e.g. when his peregrinations pull the guitar cord from the pedals and cause it to stop making sound. However, if we didn't have the wildness that leads to moments like that, we might not have gotten the point in "Humor Is Non Sequitur" where he drops the lyrics and just starts speaking in tongues. (You always knew he had it in him.) He settles down for the second half of the set, though, and the triptych is smooth and majestic, and sends us home on a high note. (Before 11:00!)
