Baltimore Round Robin, Feet Night

For a full album of Feet Night pictures, click here.

So I'm finally getting around to finishing my review of Wham City's Baltimore Round Robin tour. A few things, namely Christmas, New Years, and a long weekend in DC got me off track, but I think I'm back now. At least, I'm in Baltimore, it's 8:30 am, I've been up since 5:50, and I have a triple-shot of espresso in a cup nearby (why did I buy that?), so I'm reasonably sure.

Night two of the big Wham City party at Sonar a few weeks back, which was supposedly about bands that make you move, and it was indeed partly about that, but what that means is it was roughly equally split between weird electro-art projects like Dan Deacon and Adventure, extraordinarily loud hardcore bands like Double Dagger and Thank You, and just plain bizarre acts like the disco-punk outfit Future Islands and Nuclear Power Pants, a hard-funk band featuring Eyes Night comedian(?) Show Beast on vox, and guitarist and bassist wearing enormou shark-like costumes. Here's what I thought of the bands:

Thank You: Nothing against what these guys were trying to do -- noisy mosh-punk -- I just didn't think they were terribly interesting. Without the stage presence or interesting instrumental approach of a band like DD, I sort of lose interest relatively fast in all the screaming and smashing around. Online, they're a bit more interesting -- an exercise in tension-building through repetition and the addition of constituent instrumental parts, not to mention some pretty awesome freak-out drum work, but still not that good.

Double Dagger: It's been about six months, I think, since I've heard "Luxury Condos for the Poor" performed live, and since I heard it here, I've had a heightened awareness for the "now available for lease" signs tacked onto to every hoity-toity, glass-walled residential complex from Harbor East to Logan Circle (which I saw yesterday, incidentally). There's something about the subtlety of the line "They're building a Ghost Town," which singer Nolan Strahls repeats over and over again atop the layered, heady, and ultimately really impressive bass playing of Bruce Willen, when compared to the callousness of the cymbal-and-shrieks chorus ("They're building luxury condos for the poor!") that makes it seem more brilliant than it is. But for some reason I just really adore the idea of what is certainly a rather elitist punk band (the two front men are both graphic designers who run a company called "Post-Typography". I mean, come on.) writing songs about things that I see and notice every day, about cities changing, and about ideas that people I know spend a good deal of time trying to analyze in print, and having their version come out more eloquent for its simplicity. Oh, yeah, and having the song effing rock.

Height: Besides that song from "The Woods" (best lines in film: "The doctor says that I'm hyphy and I have the Bubonic Plague" and "A fever of 96? That's so hot!"), which Show Beast showed on "Eyes Night," I don't find Height's work as an MC or a producer that compelling. The gal from A.K. Slaughter and a few others were on stage, which gave Height's songs the feel of a hipster hip-hop collective, which wasn't that cool because why, exactly, should I care? I hardly care when Spank Rock assembles these huge crews of foul-mouthed rappers for shows, and I generally know his tunes before I see them.

Adventure: After reading this Michael Byrne profile of this dude, I had exactly zero interest in seeing him live, but was actually surprised at how much I enjoyed his performance and how little I cringed when it was his turn to perform in the Round Robin. I was expecting something a little more akin to Elf Power in the video game sense, but the cheap Nintendo themes were hardly discernable and present mostly in an aesthetic, rather than literal sense. Also, he played some keyboard lines live, over beats that were eminently danceable.

Smart Growth: As an inconsistent-at-best fan of electronic music, this is another act that I was surprised to find myself enjoying, and even dancing pretty hard to. It had most of what I remember liking about all that Big Beat and Happy Hardcore techno that I occasionally checked out in high school, but with less-annoying samples and none of the stupid over-repetition. The mood was only spoiled a little bit when DJ-man Denny Bowen (also, incidentally, drummer for Double Dagger) paused his act for a minute to chastise the audience for crowding him, despite the fact that he was on a small scaffolding and from where I stood, in no apparent danger. "I've performed for a lot of people a lot of times and never felt like I was going to die," he told them. And then for the rest of the night, every time he played, he had two really weak-looking hipsters acting as bodyguards, standing in front of him and blocking everyone's view. Lame.

Lizz King: is not funny. She's a solo act, and she performs white-girl rap songs and some folk songs and she looks a lot like Sarah Silverman. But she's all shtick, her music is unlistenable, and her cover of Rihanna's "Umbrella" is insufferable. No wonder she allegedly got naked at Whartscape last year.

Future Islands:is funny. The band plays sorta theatrical electro-rock, like Meat Loaf meets Roxy Music fronted by Jack Black. I really enjoyed this band, although I can't be sure what the names of any of their songs were. Listen here; it's really good.

Dan Deacon: was meh. I mean, I've seen this guy like 6 times now, and it rarely gets any more interesting. He started with "The Crystal Cat," which is a good song, and went on to play some new stuff, but I just have a hard time getting into Mr. Deacon these days. This is possibly because 95% of the crowd at "Feet Night" was under-18 and annoying and thrashing around giddily, as though they'd been let out of the house just once a month and needed to make the most of it. During one of his songs, some drunken high schooler came up to me and asked me if I was in one of the band, and I foolishly told her no, at which point she went over and started flirting with Denny Bowen. Afterwards I grabbed her and asked what her next question would have been, had I said yes. She told me she was looking for weed, which was certainly a lie, but it was a funny-ish illustration of what the crowd was like: pubescent teens looking to score at the after-party. This is how classy Baltimore is.

Blood Baby: was playing so loud that I could hardly hear anything, but I really liked it. Peter O'Meara, the (former) guitarist from the Death Set (who incidentally, moved to Philly, which sucks, but may be part of a fiendishly clever business plan to move from one post-industrial town to another building hipster fan base, until Jonny Siera takes over the world), is in this band, and you can totally hear his mark on it. Electro-spaz-punk that really gets you going if you know it well enough to shout along.

I am sure I missed some other bands that played here, but I was probably too busy having a staring contest with funny clown (he won) and mourning the absence of the Death Set, even though they were listed on the posters. My overall thoughts are: successful endeavour, this. I've never heard of a set-up quite like it, with each band taking turns performing one song each and the audience dutifully running from one stage to the next, turning their heads in unison. Not all the bands were good, but what can you expect? Also, for all their childish screwing around, hipster self-consciousness and infuriating wannabes, it is really nice to see that Wham City still exists, and that DIY projects are being done, even if not in DIY spaces (by the way, I heard about a new one just now, which I plan on visiting next week). It's good to keep up appearances and make Baltimore seem like a new model of your typical city in the midst of an artistic flowering -- Bohemian Prague or Paris between the wars, only in the American post-industrial world -- you know, Kokoschka and Picasso, only with video games.