Bands In A Barbershop With Beers For Fears, Speed Of Light, The Lungs, The Birth Defects, Tasty Face, Saturday March 23rd 2019

Alyson Camus|March 26, 2019

Bands In A Barbershop, Beers For Fears, Speed of Light, TASTY FAcE, The Birth Defects, The Lungs

The Birth Defects

If you were still watching TV on Saturday night, when there was another ‘Bands in the Barbershop’ events, you were truly wasting your time. Organized by Brian O’ Connor of the 6660s and hosted by Charley Waffles of Dirty Cakes, the free-for-all event often showcases young and upcoming bands, performing in a real American barbershop, this awesome place on Sunset Boulevard with vintage leather seats. At each Barbershop event, which happens every two months, you can see no less than 5 bands, and last Saturday, Beers For Fears, Speed for Light, The Lungs, the Birth Defects, and Tasty Face entertained a very happy crowd.

Fronted by the tall Derek William Scott, Beers for Fears had a lot of pathos, fury, and theatricality. After a dramatic reading from a large black book – the book of bones? – they went for the full creepy ambiance with macabre guitars and launched a raucous punk party with a mad pit which brought all the fists in the air. They were as entertaining as a scary dark novel that you can’t take seriously although everyone was ready to fight teeth and nails for these ‘bone wizards’.

Every time I see teenager rockers Speed of Light, they top themselves with massive guitar riffs, an authentic rock attitude that brings to mind a myriad of bands from metal to punk. Their set was a truly furious one, with even more screaming than usual, switching from dissonant punk to Sabbath metal and grungy hurling. All three siblings sing, sharing the task with perfect professionalism and a natural well beyond their young age: Riley is only 12 but the howls she lets go are unreal, while her two brothers Cameron (16) on guitar and Tyler (14) on drums have the swagger of 70s punk stars.

The Lungs took over just where SOL had left, launching another fast-speed punk garage rock set, as loud as the neighborhood permitted, with hammering drums, distorted guitars on an annihilation mission and aggressive hurling vocals. Saying that the energy was high all set-long would be an understatement,… they were delivering their songs like high-speed bullets, supersonic rockets with busy noisy layers and an appetite for destruction.

No matter how often I have seen the Birth Defects before, they are always an impressive roaring machine with punk assaults piling at the top of each other. Frontman Jason Finazzo runs the head-banging punk mayhem with the help of guitarist Tim Dawson, drummer Anthony Drinkwater, and bassist Philip Neilsen’s unpredictable moves. More than ever, their epic sound, which is probably too big for any place, was not that easy to describe, as it brought noise rock elements and intricated mathcore bits, while their weirder compositions brought crazy dissonances with plenty of tempo shifts, engulfing heavy sludgy riffs to psychedelic madness.

The night could have slowed down with Tasty Face but frontwoman Delphine de St Paër (aka Queen Delphine), who was not the type to cool down any place, was rather a force to reckon, while everyone was following in her wild stage antics. With a punk attitude and a genre-bending fusion of rock and soul (Tasty Face is originally a project in collaboration with Fishbone man Angelo Moore and guitarist virtuoso Eric McFadden), the band put a smile on people’s faces, and the music brought vibrant energy and dynamic tempos, while we were never tired to look at Queen Delphine taking over the stage.