music
Random notes from a beer-, sweat- and adrenaline-soaked night at Neon Reverb
Afghan Raiders. Photo by Bill Hughes
- You know what’s cool? Walking up to the Beauty Bar and seeing a motley crush of nouveauhemians spilled on the sidewalk, bantering and funning in an unself-conscious tableau of urban vitality or something.
- Even if the women all seemed to be dressed like secretaries from WKRP In Cincinnati.
- Bands I tried on and liked: Outside Looking In, a hip-hop crew that married fast-spitting raps over a thicket of sound that was equal parts synth and samples. Smart move to do a split set with fellow locals Werd to the Mothership; Outside Looking In’s sonic density seems to ask for small doses. Werd to the Mothership followed with a sustained splash of chummy, burbling, sparkly, ambient electro. Imagine being gently submerged in a warm aural bath in some future Blade Runner age, or being privy to the musings of an introspective robot. It was all craftily embellished with turntable skritch, Playskool keyboards and mantralike vocals that sounded like digital lava languidly bubbling to the surface. Head-turning, unexpected and compulsively listenable.
- San Diego’s Syndicate danced, flailed and sweated, but its fever never broke. That’s because it’s more than a fever, it’s a syndrome: The band’s jangly, propulsive post-rock never cracked the shell of the countless influences — Killers, Editors, Coldplay, U2, etc. — that smother it.
- At March’s Neon Reverb, Oakland hip-hop duo Themselves blew the top of my head off with their lacerating wit and insanely close-packed rhymes. Maybe I’ve developed a tolerance; maybe the band’s between-song badinage this time around seemed a bit self-indulgent and tiresome. But the thrill wasn’t completely gone. When mohawked Adam “Doseone” Drucker raps, he rules — with enough momentum, his improbably nasal voice approaches a guttural, run-on growl that’s almost exhilarating.
- So, all night, everyone’s like, YouGottaSeeAfghanRaiders! YouGottaSeeAfghanRaiders! So I stuck around through beer fog and hipster-induced claustrophobia to see this supposedly rising local act play the main room at Beauty Bar. I’m happy to report they come as advertised. Afghan Raiders wrung the scrunching-room-only crowd with a relentless set of jet-propelled electro-rock that’s direct but not blunt, brainily artless and refined in its simplicity in the happy manner of Daft Punk and MSTRKRFT. Verdict: Yeah, YouGottaSeeAfghanRaiders!
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