This is Not a Love Song

Well, I went to Death Disco last night for the first time, hence the post title lifted straight from a PiL song title, albeit it one much later than their classic "Death Disco" single. I went because my downstairs neighbor Annie works in the music industry and one of the bands that she helps promote is this band from Boston called Aloud. Thus, she invited me out and since I'm always up for checking out a rock club I haven't been to before, I accepted the invite. Anyway, the first band at first was typical indie-rock 3 piece with a female singer/guitarist, but after about 2 songs, the singer switched to playing an acoustic guitar and they became an alt-country act in the vein of Neko Case's solo albums or maybe even Whiskeytown. They're a bit unfocused and I could tell that they hadn't been playing together for that long, but they definitely have potential and the singer/guitarist was playing sick, which must've been tough. The second band wasn't terrible, but pretty generic, so after a few songs, I went outside. Then Aloud came on. They were by far the best of the 3 bands that I saw. They're a very loud 4 piece rock band (2 singer/guitarists, one male and one female, and a bassist and drummer) who reminded me at times of The Pixies, Fugazi and Sleater-Kinney, but with a definite '60s fetish/influence as well. They had the British Invasion harmonies down pat and even covered "Helter Skelter" (you gotta love a band whose guitarist rolls around on the floor during its blazing solo!) and closed with The Who's immortal "Baba O'Riley". They were very loud but quite good.

Oh, another cool thing is that I met the DJ (DJ Mojo), whose e-mails I often see on the Yahoo groups mailing list for The Big Takeover, the wonderful bi-annual music magazine that I happen to write for. He played some killer tunes between bands during the course of the evening, including this monstrous live version of The Avengers' "The American in Me", The Saints' "I'm Stranded", a strange German language version of The Tubes' "White Punks on Dope" and lots of other stuff.

Ooh, I'm seeing Mission of Burma tomorrow night and The Dears the night after that. I'll report back on both of those. I can't wait!

Also, I just got an iPod and just finished transferring a bunch of songs (about 1,700, which of course means that I have a lot more CDs to put onto iTunes to say the least) from iTunes onto it. Thus far, it's been incredibly easy to work with and its functionality and user-friendliness is amazing. Of course, I'll report back with my observations. Now I think I'm gonna take the plunge and buy those iTunes exclusive Mission of Burma and Trashcan Sinatras eps. I've never actually paid for downloads before (just a physical product like a CD, record or cassette), so this will be a big step for me.

And last but definitely not least, my friend Norm's band Gold Streets is playing their 2nd show ever on Tuesday night (that's the 18th, folks) at Luna Lounge at 9:30 (though they may go on earlier). I saw their 1st show at Siberia a few months back and I've heard their demo and let me tell you, they fucking rock and I'm not just saying that because Norm is one of my oldest and dearest friends. They remind me of everyone from Goo-era Sonic Youth to The Police and U2 and also of many bands that came out of the UK in the early '90s. Anyway, the show is free, so you all have no excuse not to go!