Seattle’s Night Beats started the night’s beats with solid Gang of Four/Rolling Stones-influenced surf-punk. The drummer donned a "Neil Young hat" atop a mane of long, dark hair that matched those of his bandmates. With more broken beats and rock riffs than your standard punk jam, the Night Beats consistently held my interest. They closed with a tempo-shifting number about how they “Can’t get no love” against a sprinkler of strobe lights and whompwhompwhomps that harkened the call of a Martian space vessel.
Thrash-punk New Yorkers, Cerebral Ballzy, were a kiln of blackened punk, hardening even the softest of guitar tones into prickly, rapid-fire jabs of aggression. If you’re into that sort of thing, they have a debut record coming out in July on Williams Street Records (of Adult Swim). I hope it has, like, fifty tracks on it, because each song they played was under a minute long, and there must have been well over thirty of them. If there was a set-list, it undoubtedly had a second side. The lead singer mumbled something that roughly translated to “Greetings, Portland,” but sounded more like “ImfuckindrunkasshitI’mgonnaplaysomesongsferyoumotherfuckersfuckyou.” He must have mistaken his environs for a flower garden, and his PBR for a watering can, because whenever it struck him, he sprayed his beer all over the stage… and the audience. CB’s music was a hyper cross between Minor Threat and FYP. What does that sound like? Do this: beat on a table with both hands as fast as you can. While doing so, sing in fast-forward about hamburgers, pizza, beer, and skateboarding in your very best angry-drunken-dinosaur voice. One such ditty was dedicated to our very own Burnside Skatepark: “This song goes out to Burnside ‘cause skateboarding fucking rules.” And then he said something about if anyone wanted to join him for tea and biscuits and a Jane Austen reading after the show, he’d be retiring in a wingback in the lobby of The Benson Hotel. These men indeed live up to their slogan, “Hard to the Coors.”
Looking around, I was happy to see that sparkle-shoes-fanny-pack girl was in attendance, as well as American-flag-jean-jacket man. But before I could be distracted by decorated fans any longer, the band watered the cymbals with PBR and gaily splish-splashed it upwards with a smack of the drumstick. I looked behind me to make sure I was still at the relatively posh and by no means punk-rock Wonder Ballroom venue, and yes, yes I was. This kind of rough-housing was hard to swallow in here; Cerebral Ballzy would have been more aptly placed in a gritty downtown basement bar or a lackadaisical dive. But the mismatched combination was amusing and at least inspired me to dig out my FYP records and experiment with fertilizing my flower garden with Pabst.
The boys of Black Lips knew what the crowd wanted, and instead of a set list of songs, they had this lined up: Jared approached the mic, threw his hands up and shouted, “Portlaaaaand” while guitarist Cole Alexander spat ceiling-ward and caught it in his mouth before picking up a half-full water bottle between his feet and jumping to catapult it into the crowd. After two songs, Jared insisted that the all-ages/21+ barrier be destroyed and thrown on stage. With that accomplishment, Cole triumphantly humped a microphone stand which teetered tantalizingly close to randy, squealing young ladies. For his next trick, Cole commenced a backward somersault with guitar in-hand and afterward performed an (always anticipated) French kiss with Ian Saint Pé. But their antics stopped briefly to make room for the drummer from Cerebral Ballzy to make bee-lines across the stage for a series of crowd-surfing sessions which inspired nearly everyone in the front section to attempt the same. With the exception of two or three slow-pokes, the abundance of stage-divers eventually rendered the security guards powerless and idle as they stood, arms-crossed beneath a tiny sign that read, "Absolutely NO stage diving."
But oh, yes! There were songs, too. Most of the material was fresh off their sixth (most recent) full length album, Arabia Mountain, but they threw in some oldies for good measure. “O Katrina,” “Lock and Key,” and “Bad Kids,” were among them. The boys’ energy and enthusiasm were impressive considering they were on the third month of a Europe/Canada/US tour with ten more shows ahead. The new songs carried a fuller sound with a vague country layer but never departed from the gritty, silly, and at times tortured punk rock sing-alongs for which they’ve always been reliable. They ended with stage dives (at least 200 million thousand of them), their signature hi-fives across the front row, and a brief encore performance even after a seemingly proper finale with “I Saw A Ghost.”
In the front row, with my knees knocking against the stage from a hundred bodies piling their weight on my back and a rotation of dashing gentlemen so close I could conceivably lick their shins, and without an inch to let my thoughts drift into trivialities like whether this band was suited to the venue, or what sequence of events led the twelve-year-old next to me to spend the evening at a Black Lips show, I was sufficiently (and somehow comfortably) consumed. And this is precisely what should happen at every show.
