It’s been a wild and weary week. I’ve been a little too busy to blog about things before they happened, but suffice it to say that the Girls from Seattle have been here and gone, and for just a few nights, they made Los Angeles a funner place to be. If you couldn’t tell from the photo at the top of this webpage, I love punk bands with keyboards. And the Girls succeed in dropping raw songs on us with great lyrics and percolating peals of synth that don’t sound dated or New Wave-y. It’s a splash of early New York or early London punk, e.g. Richard Hell, or X-Ray Spex but with no, um, girls in the band.
Here’s footage of them playing recently, though god knows where. I see the usual L.A. suspects in the audience, but they recently played at the Old Towne Pub in Pasadena and the Scene in Glendale, and this ain’t that footage. But you get the idea–San Fran and Portland people would do well to see these guys in the next couple of days before their tour is over. I saws ’em two nights ago and have been downtown at dawn ever since.
On the other side of the rock spectrum, so far to the other side that she’s not actually rock at all, has been Izzy Cox, a former quasi Angeleno now living in Austin. She’s been back out here for the last week and a half, playing in L.A. and Vegas, doing what technically might be called “Murder Ballads.” But get that Nick Cave shit out of your head–she sings like Billie Holiday and does stripped-down, banjo-based tunes more reminiscent of Bone Machine than of the Bad Seeds. A friend of mine has been playing drums for her on this trip, and due to some scheduling fuck-ups on my part (my band is out playing, too) I haven’t been able to catch them. It’s a pity, because now they’ve moved on up north, playing at the Black Cat Bar in Penngrove tonight (north of San Fran). Don’t make the same mistake I did–catch them now, while they’re hot and live, before they start playing arenas or morph into a Vegas lounge act.
That show was acctually an expect the law show behind headline records with my old band the examples from last year,nam filmerd as we stole the power from the old smart and final building, old jews hate punk so the cops showed, like 20 minutes later