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The first thing that strikes me about Songs from a Random House, besides their fairly odd name, is their fairly odd instrumentation. Drums, upright bass, viola, baritone ukulele, and soprano ukulele. Soprano ukulele! I've never seen a soprano ukulele before, much less heard one, and I'm not in a big hurry to hear one again. This is the guy that plays most of the leads, too. There's a huge amount of talent here--they're all really good at their instruments, and really together and solid--but the overall sound is very soft and mild, in a swingin', jazzy sort of way that doesn't work for me at all.
The Count Me Outs set up in front of the stage, with only the drummer onstage, and proceed to rip through a large number of very short, bratty, fun little punk songs with a lot of very energetic shrieking, wonderfully jagged guitar lines, and bizarrely sudden endings. Each song just seems to stop in the middle, and it's jarring every time. "Jarring" works well here.
Two thirds of Fifty Foot Wave used to be two thirds of Throwing Muses, the best band ever, and Kristin Hersh is writing the songs, so it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that I'm going to love this. Sure enough, I love this. Kristin's voice is all ragged glory tonight, and unlike the last time I saw them, I'm positioned such that I can actually hear her in the mix. The guitar is all kinds of harsh and intricate beauty, the bass lines are fiercely difficult and veer between sinuous and propulsive, and the drumming is godlike, with all kinds of fancy patterns in sixes, eights, and twelves woven together into an outrageously complicated whole. And the songs! The songs! There's just some key in Kristin's head that fits some lock in mine; she writes a song, and it sounds to me like a song is supposed to sound.
