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Almost the only bad thing about this evening comes near the beginning, when Mad Man Films announce that they're moving out of Boston. I'm sad, as I've only recently discovered that I love them. (They're only going to New York, so hopefully they'll be back to play here early and often.) Their singer/guitarist/freak-in-chief starts the show in a tee shirt, a flouncy little skirt, and fishnets, but after a couple of songs he requests "music to get naked and change guitars to," and proceeds to lose the shirt and skirt. (Standing in front, I am honored to be asked to help remove his skirt.) The music is at least as weird as the show. The drums are solid and wild. The bass lines are complicated and tuneful and provide the main melodic element most of the time. The guitar is more noisy, an accent instead of a focus, and sometimes he stops entirely to focus on his vocals. These range from screaming to spoken word to clear, soaring singing, with incredible power and a hint of vibrato. He spends a lot of time engaging the audience, explaining snippets of lyrics and exhorting us to clap along with the last song.
With their hard-to-mic array of weird percussion and three occasional backing vocalists, Badman are a difficult band to mix. So it's a pleasure to see them here, where I can hear everything. They have a weirdly countrified sound, a lead singer with a jaded and cynical air, and a whole lot of drums. They play a lot of songs in strange sixes and twelves, with nifty percussion and dysphoric slide guitar oddities sprinkled all over it. The whole thing fits together smoothly, but it's bizarre and sui generis. Oh, and highly danceable, at least if you're me.
Parts and Labor, from Brooklyn, are another band that meld weirdly disparate elements well. The spazzy drums, insanely fast and often kind of simple but with jarring stops and starts, seem to go pretty naturally with the heavily processed and effects-laden keyboards and electronics. (The electronics guys switch off to guitar and bass sometimes, usually not at the same time, but the electronics dominate the mix and are more visually striking, too.) But then the songs they're actually playing are these lovely, sweeping rock anthems. Think Midnight Oil played by post-punks. They strike just that balance between pretty and noisy that so appeals to me.
