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What a weird bill! Two Gallants are from San Francisco. There are, in fact, two of them. One of them plays guitar, with lots of delicate Appalachian-style finger-picking, sings, and plays harmonica. His voice is not great, rough and nasal, but he's a good singer given what he's got to work with. The songs are mild and hillbilly-folky. Mysteriously, the other member of the band is a stellar rock drummer. Fast, complicated, varied drumming wakes the whole thing up and makes it less soporific, though it does tend to overwhelm the soft, gentle guitar. For their last song, he switches to an acoustic guitar, the drummer takes up brushes, and it all becomes even more slow and quiet. I'm drowsy.
Clickers wake me right up. They could hardly be more different. Their schizophrenic post-rock compositions, heavy on distortion, delay, and shouting, light on melody and tonality, and frequently stopping dead before haring off in an unrelated direction, are not really very much like songs at all, as such. You probably won't find yourself humming them the next day. But they sure are fascinating. All those unexpected time changes washing over me just make me feel like dancing. This is probably just me.
Another radical change of mood with Holy Ghost Revival, from Seattle, who are Queen. Rocking, florid, melodic, kinda overblown, stage presence for days, catchy, with a whole lot of raw instrumental and vocal talent on display; yep, they're Queen all right. The lead singer plays keyboard and sings at first, but then Andy from Dial M For Murder joins them on keyboard for the last two songs, freeing the lead singer to jump, kick, shimmy, climb on the keyboard, and roll around on stage. He's a fine keyboard player, but it's really better to turn him loose in total frontman mode.
Next are Amanda Noa, from Brooklyn. In what's becoming the theme of the night, they are thematically unrelated to any of the bands who have already played. They're pretty much a dumb punk band, with a "singer" who shouts tunelessly and babbles drunkenly, and a rhythm section that play fast but never very interestingly, and drift a bit from time to time. The guitars are doing some more interesting things than typical three-chord punk song parts, and it seems like they might really be very good, but it's hard to hear them with that guy shouting. Not my thing, though some of the crowd are really into them.
Headlining are Dial M For Murder, who seem to have perhaps organized this bizarre evening. Initially, I think they are cut from the same cloth as Amanda Noa, which would be a first for this evening, but the drumming is more solid, the singer actually sings, and as the set progresses, they branch out a bit and incorporate more musical elements than strumming and screaming. There are good guitar solos, a bit of harmony, and even a song with a kind of heavy bossanova beat. They're a little hard rock for me, and I'm very tired, but they are uniformly good at what they do and there's some pretty fine songwriting going on here if I muster the effort to listen for it. I should see them again when I'm more alert.
