Index of Shows | Homepage | Upcoming Shows | Write to me
The Sanguine start us out with solid, noisy rock. They are a three-piece, rhythmically sure, with a good, weird jangle-mess of guitar. The guitarist is also the vocalist, but it's not really singing, exactly, so much as an odd succession of disconnected gruff yelps. This works surprisingly well.
Daniel Striped Tiger are a four-piece, which means even more noisy guitar wizardry. The vocals here are from the bassist, and are shouted more or less tunelessly, so we can really focus on the excellent guitar interplay. It's pretty harsh and jagged stuff, but very musical and engaging. I suspect I need to hear more of it to figure it out.
Piles almost dispense with vocals entirely. They also have guitar lines of complicated and freakish beauty—nice, coherent bill we've got here this evening—but are distinguished by the might of the rhythm section. The drum parts are involved and intricate, the odd time signatures vary in elaborately structured ways, and the bass lines are huge and powerful, providing most of the melody. Then, for their last song, they reconfigure to synth/bass/drums. I confess I'm nervous, but it works: the synth lines are simple and odd, and it sounds like a Piles song.
By the time Pinocchio Syndrome go on, I am very tired, so I'm almost hoping I won't like them so I can leave. (Not the best frame of mind for giving a band a fair listen, to be sure.) In fact, all four of them are doing interesting things. They just don't seem very good at doing them together. The piano parts are particularly intriguing, and I kind of like his vocals, but each song has these little rhythmic bobbles, and they keep pulling me out of the music, so we leave after three songs.
