Date: 2/2/07
Location: The Shape Shoppe
Bands: Aleks & the Drummer, OCDJ, Videohippos, Bird Names, Fake Lake and Santa Dads
Price: $5 sugg. donation. Cab ride home.
Things I missed to be there: Power Junkie at Delrock's, Southkore bands at Albion House
Reason for going: I was closer to The Shape Shoppe than I was to Albion House when I started drinking, plus I'd never been there
Aleks & the Drummer has been getting a lot of hype, more like a slow burn than a blitz. It maks sense, the band is doing something that nobody else is doing it right now, but unlike other bands you can say that about, Schizowave for example, they're doing it in a way that almost everyone can getdown with. Sure, Aleks Tomaszewska sometimes sings in Polish but the music has so much more of a familiar rockish base that it's not too much of a stretch.
The last article I read about them was by the Chicago Reader's new music guy Miles Raymer. I'll go on the record as liking him. His tastes vary a lot more than previous columnists. In the Sharp Darts column, he took a lot of space to describe how indescribable the duo is, and how they force you to make a number of semi-valid comparisons. I could see that. I could say that Aleks & the Drummer sounds like the now-defunct band Apartment, with less ambitious melodies and better vocals (less theatrical poetry), or that they sound like Aenima-era Tool with a K-Records-era Olympia grrl on vocals, but watching them the other night, I came up with the perfect description of their music. It's a weird reference, and if I knew what the word convoluted meant, I might call it that, but nevertheless it's perfectly apt.
Do you remember about ten years ago, when Rob Zombie had his own record label and put out nothing buy horror-themed surf records by The Bomboras and The Ghastly Ones? If you stripped those albums down to nothing but the organ lines, that's what Aleks and the Drummer sounds like.
Before them was OCDJ and his band, Videohippos. OCDJ has a show on WFMU where he plays hiphop like Blockhead, Ghislain Poirier and Bone Thugs N Harmony and other nonhiphop shit that I've never heard of. Live he's incredible, but in that dj way where I don't know how to describe it [yay for blog eloquence!]. Videohippos played indie dance that was a little bit shoegazer and a little bit Nintendo, mixed with nonsense videos. They were a great band to see live but unlike Aleks & the Drummer, I don't need to hear any of their songs again. By that same token, Aleks & the Drummer was incredible, but towards the end of their set they just seemed repetitive and I started to lose interest and wonder how I was gonna get home.
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