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Spiders are playing their very first show ever. (And, apparently, playing it with entirely borrowed gear.) There are just two of them, playing a kind of high-concept art punk. It's guitar and drums, the guitar mostly strummed with massive amounts of distortion, the drums played blisteringly fast. There are vocals, but no microphones: the two of them just scream out as they play. They are, of course, mostly drowned out by the guitar, but there are various holes in the guitar part where the vocals come through. This is a surprisingly cool effect; I can almost never make out the words at a show anyway, and here we sort of discard the pretense of it and just get weird little found-object snippets of meaning between squalls of noise. I like it.
Shark and Bear are next, mainly because two of the other bands haven't shown up yet. I've seen this band struggle to master the ridiculously hard material that they write; I am very happy to see that they have arrived. They are awesome tonight--tight, fierce, well-balanced, and melodic. Of course, you still have to love obscenely complicated math rock, with all manner of odd-time measures alternating in maddening ways, in order to get into them. As it turns out, I do. They play a five-song set, and we all get a total workout.
Crab Sounds are up next. They start out at a medium tempo, and when the singer comes in, I'm really surprised by his high-pitched, smooth-jazz sort of voice. Not the kind of thing I was expecting to hear tonight. He's strumming his guitar, and singing poppy little tunes over a funk-oriented bass line. It sounds familiar, somehow, but it takes me a while to place why. After a few songs, it becomes clear: this is lounge music! Played faster and more energetically than straight-up lounge music, which is what made it hard to recognize. Lounge-rock, if you will, or perhaps a lightweight pop-funk. They pretty much stay in this mode for their whole set, and they certainly do it well. I'm just not sure it needed to be done.
I'll admit, I want to dislike The Lido Venice just because of the rude pushing and shoving of their fans. But I can't. They're actually really good. They play very melodic rock, with a strong emphasis on the excellent lead singer. The band that they keep reminding me of is The Cure, which is odd, since they really sound almost nothing like them. And I don't even like The Cure. But there are these common elements that keep cropping up: the intensely crafted songs, the vocal hooks, the lush harmonics in the instrumental support, and the occasional keyboard lines, generally with '80s synthy-sounding patches. Think of them like a Cure that should have been, with a gutsier sound and sometimes a second drummer, and without Robert Smith's godawful whine. This may be their last show, although they leave things somewhat ambiguous.
Clickers are our hosts for the evening, and are very much in their element. Their sound, in their own space, is perfectly balanced. Their music continues to be pleasantly psychotic, with a whole lot of urgent shouting and sudden changes of direction over heavily processed guitars and a monster rhythm section. These songs rock, hard, but not in a way that's easy to get into. They require and reward close attention. The drummer is on fire tonight, with one particular ultra-fast delicacy and power section played primarily on rims that elicits spontaneous mid-song cheers from the audience.
