Location: Club Azucar
Bands: Demonslaught, Condenada, and 2 Minute Tantrum
Things I missed to be there: Scrabblor with Gutter Butter at Red-i; Thanx for the Memories with Thax Douglas, Daniel Knox, and the Syllable Section at Ronny's; Outdanced! with DJs Rand Sevilla, Pier Novikov, and Peaches at the Funky Buddha Lounge
Reason for going: Wanted to see blood get spit + it was a friend's birthday + job interview in the morning and too many motherfuckers at the Funky Buddha
A Chicago institution that may be going the way of the dinosaur is the liquor store with a bar in the back/bar with a liquor store in the back. Personal favorites in West Town and Ukie Village are long gone now, and I can't help but think that Crown Liquors/Club Azucar is next. There's just something so scummy about these places and their clientel, as if as a whole they're scummier than the sum of their parts, that Daley and his lapdog aldermen can't stand them.
As scummy liquour store bars go, Club Azucar isn't that bad. Sure, some of their regulars look equal parts living dead and cautionary tale, but if you walled off the fluorescent entrance to the store, you'd have a better looking place than any of the bars on my block. Nice TVs and jukebox, good selection, nice design, a fairly ample dancefloor and now.... punk and grindcore shows!
I hate to say it, but this may very well end up being the place's undoing. Maybe not, though, or at least not for a while. The place is doing steady business and the neighborhood is gentrifying but not a whole helluva lot. The two biggest signs I saw last night were the sign for the new comic book store and Elastic Arts, in its little space above the Chinese Restaurant.
Bludwulf was supposed to play tonight's show, but rumor has it that one of them got arrested on the road. I'd seen them before, awesome horrorcore cstumes, uninspired horrorcore music. The big draw for me was Demonslaught, which one of my friends described as "Gwar from the Southside."
The show started with Demonslaught's singer Jack rampaging through the crowd with a rubber chainsaw in a bloody jumpsuit like a viking zombie. At basement shows, I hear the band spits blood all over and plays with fire, but here they just handed out a bunch of toys.
"I now dub you Ninja...Pirate...Princess," Jack announced as he placed a talisman necklace, a Jolly Roger hat, and a light-up scepter on birthday-boy John, "and for you, we play The Beatles birthday song."
The crowd raised plastic daggers in toast as the band launched into some blistrering grind.
Condenada did their Condenada thing, with the fast parts jackhammered and the slow parts dirge-y (search this site for about a million descriptions of how they're awesome.)
2 Minute Tantrum played next. Three women from Minnesota and a guy who left Chicago for the Twin Cityies years ago. They played fun, 80s style bouncey hardcore, with a little bit more overt of a Ramones/Naked Raygun influence than most hardcore bands are willing to share these days. Happy anger.
They played til the singer's eye-makeup ran own her cheeks with sweat. The bar sold out of PBR bottles, so people toasted cans. I grabbed some 25 cent granola bars from the store out front, and left.
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