Freitag, 17. Aug 2007, 1:06

Alrighty, another show in Tucson, this time back in The Living Room, very cool small venue, one of the few up there, Smaller one this time, 3 locals and Daniel Striped Tiger all the way from Massachusetts.

First up is West, a local post-rock outfit, I had heard some demo tracks on their myspace prior to this and they were pretty decent already, but wow did they improve since then or something because this performance was amazing, they really don’t stray from the standard post-rock formula or anything but they were still good and not off-kilter or sloppy at all, even with the amount of pedals they were all using. Their sound overall was very full and entrancing, really cool experience, totally hope these guys get signed or something.

After West was Sabretooth Snatch, another local outfit, they seemed to be pretty new or something, half the songs didn’t have vocals, the guitarist, bassist, and drummer al did vocals on one or two songs separately, the music as a whole was really weird and off-kilter by any genres standards, they kinda reminded me of The Catalyst in that “we don’t give a fuck, just jam” kinda way, you could hear hardcore, punk, stoner, grind, everything in em, just sloppily thrown together and played as loud as they could, really fun guys, cool performance, more of a live band though, I doubt I’d like em on disc haha.

After this SS’s singer said someone was up next but they didn’t know who, apparently DST wasn’t even there yet, so while everyone was chilling outside they were starting to get nervous cuz nobody was there, but just as some of the venues owners/friends were asking if anybody saw a blue school bus in town, here comes the blue school bus that DST were touring in, and the show was back on!

Daniel Striped Tiger’s set was Good aside from the fact that the vocals were waaay waaay too low, I don’t know if it was due to The Living Room’s lack of speakers or what, but the mics were set waay low, you could barely hear em. Regardless, the set slayed, the new LP is just plain awesome, and hearing it live was even cooler, it was a lot more gritty and distorted, and just louder in general live (which is kinda a ‘duh, its live’ kinda thing, but I still felt they really sounded different than in studio, unlike other bands who are pretty similar live). Sucked there wasn’t a huge turnout tonight, maybe 30 kids max, because they were really awesome.

Last up was Alan Smithee, another local band, once again I had heard some tracks on their myspace before and it wasn’t bad, cool post-rock, not that rehearsed or refined but they were just demos. And just as with West, they blew me right out of the water, put on a great great show. Started out playing pretty quiet twinkly post-rock, crescendoing higher and higher as always, but unlike west, they were a lot heavier and in-tune with the sludge style, a lot of the songs became really really heavy towards their climaxes, just shaking the whole room, you could feel It deep within your bowels dammit. Half of this was due to their Bass, it was just fuckin thunderous, huge, thick, heavy, amazing, the bassist did a damn good job at adding to the band, by no means was he just there for rhythm. After the show I was asking the guitarist for a demo but they didn’t have em, yet he was cool enough to load all their material on my ipod for free, kick ass!