Dirty Laundry TV Summer Fest At The Satellite, Sunday June 21st 2015, Review
The Frights
With their trucker-hat country blues, the Abigails continued the long day of music, their frontman was singing it drunk while they were going into western and catchy territories, and a woman in the audience was wearing a totally appropriate ‘Willie for president’ shirt… I thought they sounded familiar with their very laid back attitude, but since frontman Warren Thomas was also part of the Growlers, it was not surprising.
I was happy to see San Diego’s own the Frights, I had seen them opening for FIDLAR last year and their choice was totally making sense. Their youthful pop exuberance put a smile on everybody’s face, and they dedicated their songs to all the dads in the audience — it was after all father’s day. They had a beachy-surfy explosive sound with tender moments going all doo-wop on you, and once again they were super retro, but they did it with a real freshness, turning punk fury into real sweetness. Their set was all jumpy, bouncy with many ahhhh-ohhhh harmonies, a bit like FIDLAR, and the crowd had a lot of fun… which makes me think, they are gonna be super successful very soon?
Gateway Drugs totally changed the mood with their shoegazing psychedelia. They suddenly installed a very loud wall of gothic fuzz, with ghost vocals totally buried in the fog, the kind of music to turn you deaf à la My Bloody Valentine, stretching distortion for long minutes, being overall quite dark with some really interesting upbeat moments.
Mike Watt & the Missingmen brought punk dissonance and jazz chord progressions from San Pedro (Mike never missed to mention it) and this time, Mike didn’t sing much, letting guitarist Tom Watson do the job. Were they the veterans of the night? Probably but they couldn’t care less and the crowd was jumping with them.
I guess I should know more about Possum Dixon, and I want to after seeing Rob Zabrecky perform with some members of the band. He is such a dynamic and restless performer, jumping all over the place, while insisting keys and a post-punk production were keeping him moving and running. He had some David Byrne kind-of-moves, jogging non-stop at the same place with a tiresome energy, explaining that their cover of Parquet Courts ‘Borrowed Time’ was the reason why they were playing tonight. But the highlight of the show, if I may say, was Rob asking the crowd for a condom, and surely some people go to shows with condoms, and making it disappear in front of our eyes. Did you know that Rob is an award-winning magician at the Magic Castle in Hollywood these days?
I remember Audacity being a surfy-punky kind of band band, but remove the surf part, and keep the punk part, they are a youthful and sweaty band with guitar assaults and monster riffs, but they keep a very poppy sound at core. They scream and hit hard, kneel down as if they were the new guitar heroes, but for some reason the Satellite crowd is not really the Echoplex crowd, it was a dads crowd which didn’t take any risk at crowd surfing, and just did some friendly moshing.
Some courageous people had stayed for Colleen Green – it was a Sunday night and already close to midnight – and they were almost all men! She adjusted her sunglasses and taped on her iPad which was providing the beats for her songs. She looked just as cool and laid back that the time I saw her at Amoeba, very thin and all legs in her tiny shorts, bringing sweetness over a raw sound with a certain attitude, i.e. the sunglasses in a dark club at midnight. She looked like a more intellectual Best Coast, and she could embody the cute side of punk, although there’s nothing cute in her lyrics.
I have hardly seen any of the people who were playing on the second stage, I have hardy listened to Paul Bergmann’s melancholia on harmonica, Nima Kazerouni’s (of So Many Wizards) sweet covers, Samira Winter’s Portuguese songs, Rudy De Anda’s sunny harmonies on guitar, Los Angeles Police Department and Rufrano’s boy on boy or boy on girl vocal harmonies, and Hobart W Fink’s raw punk number covering Green Day… but there were way too many bands for a single day.
