METZ is another band playing at the FYF Fest this year. I have seen them several times but I want to catch them again as their shows are always an empowering experience with the ghost of Nirvana floating above their explosive sound. I saw them for the first time in 2012 at the Echo and this was my experience at the time:
With their blend of retro and modern punk, they managed to open for Sleater-Kinney during their last tour, which is probably not an easy task to accomplish. An all-girl band opening for an all girl-band, just imagine the competition! But Pins doesn’t even want to look or sound like the cool trio from Olympia, they want to have fun, delivering harmonies over pop melodies, speeding up at time without going overboard, bringing head banging with a real noise punk inspiration, while letting the power chords have the best part.
At this moment, I am sure everybody was thinking at unison, ‘I wish he was still with Girls’? This will probably be always in the back of our minds, but with his blonde hair hiding his face, fragile vocals and his vulnerable appearance, Chris Owens looks so frail at time, you just wonder if he can put on a show, but after a few minutes, you are convinced he certainly can!
I spent another Sunday night at the Echo, and this brought me right back in the middle of last summer, with a ‘Part Time Punks’ soiree featuring Feels, Burnt Ones, Corners and Cosmonauts… another sleep-depraved 24 hours in perspective to start the week, but it was all worth it
The cool thing with these residencies is that the crowd is full of musicians enjoying the set of other bands (I recognized at least one of the Mystic Braves), and my Silver Lake-Echo Park neighborhood looks like a big family of musicians packed inside the Echo, right?
Kera is not your average frontgirl, she is so dynamic, so full of life, looking like a little happy volcano always ready to explode at any moment with her songs, that the show was pure joy and fun. The band may have found the right description to fit their cute songs bursting at your face in repeat, ‘bipolar folk’
It’s very hard on weeknights for everyone but these Criminal Hygiene Mondays residencies are full of super badass bands, and last Monday, presented by Dirty Laundry, was no exception
a good-sized crowd had come to plunge into their surfing-dancing psychedelia
So many indie bands sound alike, but Infantree was showing a real uniqueness which was certainly borrowing from the 70s and way beyond, ‘Fibber’ had a little bit of this Jefferson-Airplane-Grateful-Dead-CSN-hippie generation smoking through the cracks of the song
