Dirty Laundry Summer Fest At The Satellite, Sunday June 21st 2015 Review

Los Angelinos don’t know how much they are spoiled with all this music around, all the time. On Sunday afternoon, Dirty Laundry TV had organized a Summer Festival, a long day of music at the Satellite with more than 20 bands playing non-stop from 2 pm to midnight. Another music marathon that I attended, giving me with a serious case of tinnitus this morning.

It’s impossible to remember all the diversity of all these bands’ music, and it’s even more complicated to write about it, but there was a lot of punk, pop, rock, it was light or heavy, clean cut or totally misbehaved, I got sprayed with beer, my eyes were burning, my camera got wet, and people moshed their hearts out during the sets of Death Hymn Number 9 and Audacity among many others.

It’s all fuzzy in my head now, just like the guitars of Gateway Drugs, my memories in my brain are very loud just like The Birth Defects’ heavy riffs, and I have a hang over, but honestly I probably feel much better than this Sloppy Jane front girl! Man, did this crazy woman put up a trashy riot if I’ve ever seen one!

Let’s go back to the beginning, my day started with Deep Fields’ dense, elaborated fuzz-surf songs. They were a quintet with a big sound and intricate layered guitars, and their singer/guitarist frontman was barefoot on his numerous pedals. Their songs were like beach road trips with violent fuzzy waves, splashing salty water salt all over the place, before fading away in a serene manner at the end.

SadGirl were, of course, a band of guys and they had an aggressive retro-surf sound fronted by a nervous frontman with a sort of cute androgynous look who was holding his guitar tight. I really like their 60’s revival music injected with a real punk energy and some well-placed surf-fuzz.

The Birth Defects were next and with a name like this, I wasn’t expecting lullabies. They were indeed very heavy, in a very good way. They slaughtered the place, there’s no other way to put it, with a blend of hard rock, screams and a beast master attitude (this is something I overheard in the crowd). Their imposing frontman had a Motörhead presence and they brought a true rock & roll attitude with a hardcore loudness,… the stage didn’t look exactly the same afterward.

GRMLN, a band from San Francisco, had a much more upbeat and playful sound. Their indie rock was very guitar-oriented, foot-tapping with a dynamic and poppy sound, and the guitarists seem so young. They had some shrill guitar lines detaching for the music and some of their last songs even reminded me the Strokes.

The all-girl band Sloppy Jane sure knew how to trash the place, their frontgirl played it very GG Allin, and if you thought a few years in punk music were necessary to do that sort of things, you are very mistaken. She sprayed tons of Pabst beer on the crowd, rolled her back on the wet floor, aggressed people in the crowd, screamed and swore, and of course showed her naked buttocks at the end of the set. Trash Jane had decided to start a sexy orgy over an aggressive sound and lot of dissonance, and she gave to the crowd, which was a bit scared and shy, the ultimate insult, ‘it’s because you are ooooold’… yeah, you know what, may be I am too old to get the cheap beer baptism, and her leg-apart acrobatics looked a bit forced at times, especially when she put her two feet in the garbage can and started throwing out all the trashed stuff around. Still she had some balls.

Death Hymn Number 9 didn’t slow down the rhythm, but I knew what to expect since I had seen them before. Their set looked like a zombie movie crashing an already out-of-control party, they raise hell with a punk-rock-blues, possessed-by-the-demons guitars and a manic short frontman who spent half of the time moshing in the middle of the crowd. It was boogie horror on Halloween night, chaos followed and this even included some wrestling.

I was happy to see Kera and the Lesbians again (I have seen them many times before) since have always truly enjoyed their shows, probably because there is a obvious authenticity in what they do. With her romantic serenades sung with tremolos in her voice, Kera is such an entertaining and fierce frontgirl, she plays these retro-languid songs which unexpectedly jump at your face at the next second. Her ‘bipolar folk’ works every time, thanks to her impetuosity, passionate delivery, and her thousand face-expressions. Once again it was a set of petulant music, whose quirkiness only compared to its uplifting mood. Kera lives in a world where she never stops smiling and it feels so good.

Plenty of pictures of the bands here