After the set I ask the chick singer if Obamanation have anything recorded yet. they haven’t. Obamanation have just started out. They don’t have a webpage, they don’t have a Facebook page, I wonder if they have cell phones.
But what they do have is a brace of great songs, a sense of humor and a stage presence. On the Bowery Electric stage they fill it up as if stages abhor a vacumn the way the CIA abhor Islamic regimes.
The four piece band is lead by a bearded guy and he and the bass player interrupt each other as they tell truths and lies about themselves and the songs. The bearded guy leads off one song by saying they wrote it when they were an alternatic rock band living in Hoboken in 1989. He also claims to have written another song while in South Africa in 2008 in the middle of a civil war which could happen here if the Arizona State law on immigration is not repealed.
It is the tude of the young. Stuck in a world they never made, Obamanation rail against US injustice while singing songs that try and slip through easy genre fixations. “Guns And Knives” starts as surf n turf and ends as pure thrash. “The Swallow” (he wants to know if she does), is like a pure alt pop groove thang meets ska.
Better still is an unnamed song sung by the girl (who has every chance of becoming something of a local pin-up for college age virgins throughout the Lower East Side) encapsules the fun and funny Obamation. “We Love Mudhoney” lives up to its chorus!! It’s a blast. A bit earlier she would shout “Fuck Obama” and she wasn’t suggesting miscegenation and she wasn’t a tea partier -admittedly i am not paying close attention but this is the first note of dissent I have heard from the Left about the president.
The bass player is a wise ass and in a backwards baseball cap he is the most energetic. He introduces a cover of a song I’ve never heard dating from 1994 (if the band can be trusted) with “This is the best song you’ll hear tonight”. The song, “Nobody Home” is pretty catchy.
The set wasn’t perfect. It might have been at half an hour but
a) an hour was too long and around the three quarters mark they lost me for awhile.
b) they should change their name to Abomination (people would find the pun funnier if they discovered it themselves and they could still use their opening salvo, “we live in a…”
c) There is no “c”. That’s it. They are a witty, clever, melodic, hard band anchored by a fine drummer. They play with genres (alt, ska, punk, , thrash and back again) and one of their catchiest songs is about genocide (“Holocaust was too specific…”) and their other catchiest is a song called “Ooooh Ahhhh” and it’s a singalong.
Obamantion are a blast of energy, fun, political naivete, sexiness, smartness, cheekiness. I love young bands when they are this good. Dunno how you are gonna find em but…