Another Night at Kimos

This show was free, since I still had the wristband from the night before. My conscience didn't put up too much of a fight. I am a cheap bastard.

Going to this place on your own, if you're seeking to enjoy the music and not socialize, is a bit awkward. I gotta say, this place attracts some colorful characters, and not all of them are the types you want to talk to, but avoiding contact with them in a place this small? Not the easiest thing in the world. Still, no one was really threatening and it was relatively simple to set up a base camp where you could keep watch over your stuff and still check out the music.

It was a four-band night but I missed the first act. The last three were serrial nightmares, in ways both good and bad.

I am perceptive when it comes to art. I can usually read an artist's intention and subtext with reliable accuracy. JEALOUSY, the group, clearly operates on some level I simply cannot grasp.
One relatively-normal looking musician guy in a hat, playing with delay and reverb and a whole plate of effects pedals, doing some spoken-word thing so heavily echoed that I couldn't make out any of it, backed up by a woman in a 1950s style polka-dotted dress, red nylons, and some 1920s-1960s era porn projected on the wall upside down. That was their backdrop. A tall blond girl was also apparently part of the band?... She was so drunk she couldn't stand up straight, she almost fell on me while I crouched to get a better look at the spectacle onstage, offered me a sip of her drink as an appology, walked onstage, collapsed against the wall and, it looked like...fell asleep? Then got up, wandered over to the guy playing the effects-bass, threw her arms around him and warbled into his microphone. I assume she was..part...of...the show? I'm not sure. And there was a lanky drag queen in colorful cleft-palate style make up eating bananas while posing elegantly on a folding chair right there in front, right onstage. The bananas had been painted black. That was all he did. It was all very...artistic? Yeah. I don't even know. After that I hoped the next act would be a bit more straightforward.

It was, but only a bit. Aunt Dracula are a Philadelphia psychadelic band that suffers from a severe lack of a rhythem section. Two guitarists, one pale and red-headed with a striped polo shirt, the other with a silver plaid shirt and a hat that matched, and a long-haired guy who'd qualify as a giant bent over a PC clicking a mouse to produce bursts of drum noises. Guys.... you're great with the effects. It's all very trippy, but without a real rhythem section, the whole thing feels rootless. Not a very memorable set.

I gotta say this about The New Thrill Parade: they were memorable. They were also the most serreal nightmarish brood of the night. Think CAKE's rythems and diverse instrumentation, but with the tempo slowed to a funeral march and a singer who spends each song sobbing and begging and sucking on his microphone. That was when he wasn't wearing his pink pig gimp-mask. This whole line-up looked like the cast of some dark Wonderland type fable. The big percussionist on the floor, banging out on a pair of cymbols and a drum, actually rocked back in forth, miming like he was sobbing his heart out, dressed in a flesh-tone apron criss-crossed with strips of color, like some sort of color butcher throwing a tantrum. the saxaphonist was a girl in a hoody wearing what looked like a net made of torn gray sheets and a full-face gorrilla mask. A huge bass player had a fringed cape and a round old-man bubble mask. The keyboardist/violenist wore a cardigan and a steady expression, looking like a cousin of Steve from Blue's Clues and just as unphased about his unreal surroundings. The Guitarist stood out just because he was a guy in a t-shirt and jeans.

Guys, either everyone in the band should wear the crazy, or no one in the band should wear the crazy. When one guy is wearing homemade overalls and fashing his nipples while begging for his life through a pig gimp-mask, and one guy looks totally normal, it just dysrupts the band visual synch, and you SHOULD be visually in synch. Figure out the cast of characters you want and stick to it.

That said, this group will haunt me. I'm not even sure if I liked them or not, but I know they unsettled me. Which might have been their aim.

I gotta get better at this art thing, maybe.