It's Rocktober, that magical time of the year between Labor Day and Thanksgiving when Atlanta annually seems blessed with a far greater than usual number of good to great bands playing in town. This year's Rocktober started off with a set last night by Bay Area band Thee Oh Sees.
Atlanta sludge-grunge band All The Saints opened with a loud set of grunge and sludge. They aren't bad, but they're not nearly as good as their constant posturing and on-stage preening suggests they think they are. They sound at times like a shoegaze take on Nirvana and their drummer certainly has promise, provided, of course, he finds a better band to play in. Meantime, he and us have All The Saints. Also, as long as I'm complaining, their set lasted too long (nearly 45 minutes) for an opener, especially one with a sound as limited as All The Saints (all the songs sounded about the same after 10 minutes).
The same (all the songs sound about the same) could also be said for Thee Oh Sees, but in their case, that sound is so good you don't want it to change, and they know this and they deliver on that premise. Thee Oh Sees have an instantly recognizable style but one that's hard to classify - a sort of garage band approach to a combination of psych- and punk-rock, played at a frenetic breakneck speed reminiscent of rockabilly or its cousin, psychobilly. There's occasional lulls where they quiet things down a bit, but only so that frontman John Dwyer can hoot his trademark "Whoo" into a mic and launch another excursion into an adrenaline stratosphere. They're so energetic it's almost comical and sometimes they remind me of some sort of Mad Magazine caricature of a punk rock band, or something that Ed "Big Daddy" Roth might have imagined being played on the stereo of one of his comically over-accessorized hot rods.
They constantly have the dial on the "Fun Meter" turned up to 11, and everything they do, every gesture, every note, every word of every song, seems determined to be and to have as much fun as humanly possible. They don't seem to believe in preludes or long suspenseful introductions to their songs, they just barrel-dive right into the fun parts and then hop from one peak to the next. Life's too short for them to bother with verse-chorus-verse song structure when they can just unleash a sonic blast attack at will.
They're also incredibly prolific, which makes it hard for anyone to be familiar with all of their songs, but they did open with Dead Man's Gun from last year's excellent An Odd Entrances, and they managed to fit The Dream from 2011's Carrion Crawler somewhere later into their set. I recognized some other songs but couldn't tell you a single additional title.
Oh, by the way, did I mention yet that they now have two drummers? They both played in perfect unison most of the time, but definitely doubled the propulsion. With the only other musicians being Dwyer on guitar and vocals and a bass player, half the god-damned band are drummers.
The show kicked ass. The crowd was whipped into a frenzy and there was near-constant crowd surfing. All that and I got home by 11:15. Not bad, not bad at all.
They're also incredibly prolific, which makes it hard for anyone to be familiar with all of their songs, but they did open with Dead Man's Gun from last year's excellent An Odd Entrances, and they managed to fit The Dream from 2011's Carrion Crawler somewhere later into their set. I recognized some other songs but couldn't tell you a single additional title.
Oh, by the way, did I mention yet that they now have two drummers? They both played in perfect unison most of the time, but definitely doubled the propulsion. With the only other musicians being Dwyer on guitar and vocals and a bass player, half the god-damned band are drummers.
The show kicked ass. The crowd was whipped into a frenzy and there was near-constant crowd surfing. All that and I got home by 11:15. Not bad, not bad at all.
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