Tuesday, February 26, 2008

stellab rat gets his groove back

RONNYS226final


The Little Flower Shoppe doesn't look any different than it ever did. It looks like a run down old greenhouse that would be caked with dirt even if it hadn't been being used as a place to throw dance parties and punk shows. I was there for a party a few weeks back. Houseband MEAH! was playing with an ass-boring metal band and a DJ was playing comfort food hip hop and hipster electro tracks.

MEAH! is a really good band. You couldn't tell that from the front of the room, which was as much a dance floor as it was a mosh pit, with wiggling motherfuckers tossing their hands up to propel a crowdsurfer into the air. From that vantage point, MEAH! sounded like a garage band that had more ambition than they could afford, but outside, in the backyard, where all the guys were sent to pee, the walls and siding served to muffle the fuzz and the feedback, and what came through was beautiful. The complexities that were hinted at inside all untangled themselves and became clear. There was that hint of prog that comes through in the punk of You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, but less pretensious. The band reminded me of a jokey At the Drive In, lead by Heckle and Jeckle instead of Omar A Rodriguez Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala.

Maybe it wasn't all the band. It was a beautiful, calm Saturday night in Pilsen. Everything was covered with unsullied white snow, and the beer was free.

That was what was different about the night. There was free beer, some of it courtesy of Pabst and the rest furnished by the house, and there was free hummus and falafel from Sultan's Market, and a raffle with prizes that weren't retarded. These kids who've been sitting in the space for years, who'd thrown parties with Skyler Mendoza, shows with Bloodyminded, and at least one hacker convergence had gotten their asses officially sponsored.

It's been about six months since I'd written in this blog. Part of it was working a full time job leaving me too tired to write about the shows I've been to, and part that I was just rehashing the same shit.

Maybe six months is enough to watch the face of the underground change, not entirely but enough. Reliable hotspots like Reversible Eye and Walnut/Wolcott aren't doing shows anymore and places like the Blog Cabin and Huevos Ranchos are both under new management, but there are all sorts of new spots- The WOR Loft, The Halfway House, Fuck Mountain, The Private I, and the new Burkhart Underground, just to name a few. Parsley Flakes make dance music out of punk rock with a couple of antique synthesizers, while Civilized Man use thrift store Casios to provide a new wave backdrop for their falsetto operas, and, in other synthesizer news, the winds have shifted and Clique Talk has replaced Mayor Daley as the Chicago band most likely to succeed.

Something else that is new is........

After a good ten year run, I threw a shitty party.

Everything went wrong at the show tonight. A band dropped out at the last minute, and that was all it took to transform it from a pretty tight lineup to something sparse. On the bright side, this meant that I wouldn't have to pay a band that never thought to promote the show. On the less bright side, nobody got paid and, in fact, I owe money because next to nobody showed up.

I'm sure this is what impotence is like. I feel angry, sad, shocked, like I'm less me than I thought I was. I never thought my party dick wouldn't go hard, but tonight it didn't work, and I don't know what happened.

It's best not to think about it, about the massive promotions jag the artists and I went on, about the mad RSVP's the event got on various websites, about the awesome flyer I made, and for the super amazing bands and performers that were listed on it, and that's the show's saving grace. It wasn't everything it could have been, and moments were awkward, but the bands all kicked ass, none of them more than Yellow Cakes.

Yellow Cakes are a super poppy ghettotech duo consisting of two girls who are so hot, so stylish, and so new as a band, that I was absolutely shocked to see how tight their set was. Their songs were a mix between JJ Fad and Spank Rock, or maybe 2 Live Crew and Moldy Peaches, with a very Kid Sister-ish flow. There were songs about living room makeout parties and songs about dancing to make your tits shake and your pussy wet. It was fun ass party rap that I can't wait to see again, not to mention bump in one of my sets.

I know I've forgotten so much I intended to write to get just this far, but there's one other group I saw recently that's nothing like anything I've ever seen. The Image Front is a band consisting of three moonlighting DJs and a metal fucking guitar shredder. Their set at SmashandCrunch's Liars Club party last week started with the closest thing they were going to give to a ballad. A song that seemed to fit right in the space between Cheap Trick and Giorgio Moroder (which I'm guessing equals a ELO). After that, they became something that could only be described as aggro juke. With frontman Joe Vor-Tech growling, wtithing, and chanting things like "ho's don't know" over and over, the rest of the band was free to add flourishes of sirens, whistles and cowbelles like a live mashup of Rammstein and DJ Assault.

They were grating after a little while but not bad. Hell, most bands grate on me if they play for more than a few songs, but grating or not, at the very least, they were unique, which for better or worse is something good..