A Night at the Kimo

Not the worst five bucks I've ever spent.

Kimos has a reputation as a dive full of shady characters, so bring a friend to keep tabs on you. Besides, you'll enjoy it more if you've got a sidekick.

The upstairs room is low and narrow, the walls painted red and adorned with bills. The bar will give you ice with your free tap water. The doors open at 9, relatively late, but the actual show didn't start until almost an hour after that. The stage was so small that the lights, rather then the edge, seemed to dictate it's real parameters: you stayed out of the band's light, and you stayed out of their space. It takes someone with real guts to enter that sphere, which a friend of mine did: gutsy, but gutsy is what listening to the Ferocious Few makes you, so I didn't blame him.

The Ferocious Few are a two-piece southern-rock/Rockabilly group, getting street-famous for gate-crashing other people's big gigs and poaching several hundred members of the audience for themselves. There's always more then a few converts after a Ferocious onslaught: they were the single best group I saw at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and they weren't even formally booked there. Even on a formal stage you can see what makes this pair special: they play like every eye has to be won, that they could get kicked out at any moment, and everything depends on playing with everything they've got NOW. Their drummer is a madman with a tiny drumset, a stone-wall pout and a tamborine. The singer has a dark, brooding presense, a southern twang in his voice, and a really loud amp. This is an expression of hope and a kind of faith: at a time when the music industry doesn't know how to make stars anymore, these two won't stop until THEY'RE as big as the people they poach their audiences from. You catch these guys once and you don't forget them. Check them out here. As is often the case with this band, they were the best set of the night.

Rollar Coaster was up next: a three peice consisting of a bassist with a tattooed neck, a lot of sinew, and a back leather leather cap; a drummer with a long John Kerry type chin and a strawberry goatee, and a singer with authentic British vowels, a green military-style jacket, an orange slab of a guitar, and a vendetta against microphones. Really: he threw his to the ground not once but twice. All my friend and I could figure was that that must have been a really good move at some other show, but in the Real World when you throw your microphone to the ground, and your hands are occupied with your guitar, you gotta fumble to get it in position again before you can again sing into it. I can understand mistaking this once I guess, but twice? The rhythem section were pros about it and played right their their frontman's fumbles, so there's no way the song was going to fall appart, but there are quite a few kinks to work out in this live show. They were good musicians, and they've got some catchy tunes with some meaty riffs, and the finale with the twin feedback squeels between the bass and the guitar were pretty classic, but they've got some ways to go before they're a tight rocking unit.

The Revealers are probably big White Stripes fans. I can't think of why I'd say that except their frontman's androgenous bangs, white face and scarlet eye-shadow and all-black garb. He strutted the stage, but sensitively and delicately. He was the first of the night to leave the stage, turn his back to the audience, servay his bandmates and then walk back. A keyboard filled the bass's part and lead vocals were handed off between the guitarist and the keyboardist. It didn't matter though: they have the same sort of pure young-man type voices, and the mix or the mic or the reverb or something was so bad that no one could understand a word of the lyrics no matter what happened. My friend called them bluesy; I say their songs were interchangable and ran one into the next. They were also good musicians, especially for dudes who looked as young as they were (I swear that frontman has BRACES!) but they didn't grab me. They'd be worth a look though.

Three bands for five bucks and none of them stunk. Not bad, not bad at all.