tremendous – tremendous musicians and tremendous sound – I don’t know enough about the genre except to say it was salsa-dancing music and the still-hipped people partook – they’re described as a Cuban band that plays a variety of Latin music – crowd so happy it made me wish I’d been born in Cuba

so here’s the story – I came to love one song (“Good Bye Mary Lou”), a punkish bluegrass song, by this no-name band called Angels of Light and propagated it through all mixes therewith – I had a vague notion of Akron/Family but didn’t know they’d been the backing band for Angels of Light until I read their show bio – the show bio also mentioned Michael Gira as the lead singer of Angels of Light which got Rockboy excited because he knew him as the lead singer of the Swans – anyway, we went to this show because of a string of distant associations – I was mostly pleased and the anti-anything-remotely-psychedelic Rockboy was not – they are in essence a jam band, tapping such a wide variety of sounds that I characterize them officially as a schizophrenic band – they literally have no distinguishing characteristic which, even if I am a girl who loves variety, may not be a good thing for a band looking to make a name for themselves – they began with a song that made me love them: a more psychedelic Songs: Ohia (melancholy folk) – suddenly it was thrash which firstly is a signature move of this generation (to intersperse loveliness with hardness) and secondly seemed an misguided attempt to prove they’re not soft or that they’re hip to all aspects of our culture – but in sum, it didn’t sound good and it didn’t sound organic – they then proceeded into the other tagsound of this generation of music, Afro pop, which they did very well, reminding me of Paul Simon – in the end, I believe that they will return, if they want to endure, to the sounds that are their strength: very pretty and sophisticated pop – if it matters, they dress like 70s road hippies with t-shirts and bandanas which seemed to me a lame attempt to suggest campfire jams

equal parts stoner metal, 80s goth, shoegaze, and jam band (at least during some of the drum solos) – you’re probably picturing a bunch of guys on stage right now you big sexist – but no, an all-girl band, and girls of about 23 at that – breaking through all the barriers, this generation of girls are – and hotties, every last one of them, with the sort of style that redeems it – the shy one with bangs covering her face and a flannel shirt a la the 1990s on lead electric guitar with the voice of a sweet demon – the main vocalist also on electric guitar with Robert Smith’s hair in white and a longish tailored black jacket – pretty-pretty girl on bass in dead-center who ought not to have chewed gum through the whole show – and then the drummer. oh the drummer! when they were setting up, I thought, “there’s one bitter glum girl” but by the time she got going she was helplessly ecstatic, hands and grins a-flying – some people were born to be drummers and this girl is one of them – she is the driving force behind the band, leading her friends and the audience from slow melancholy wailing to driving thrash to genuine dance rock beats – they used echo effect on all of the vocals which is kind of cheating but definitely created an effect, reminded me of Siouxsie in spirit to some extent but of a much harder Mazzy Star most definitely – general aura reminiscent of The Cure with one song in particular completely replicating the dark ringing undertones – especially skilled at mixing tempos without seeming false about it and then drawing you into a lovely mindless repetitive loop of drone – their most memorable song, although maybe not their best song, was “Billie Holiday”: it began with one of them harmonizing original lyrics to the others spelling out B-I-L-L-I-E-H-O-L-I-D-A-Y – it sounds cheesy but it wasn’t – the song then progressed into a dark cover of “My Guy” – can’t figure these girls out in general I would speculate they’re clean upper class girls with solid music training and burner leanings but that would just be speculation – it is not speculation to say that I like them quite a lot – 3 other best things about the show: 1) crowd was distinctively hipster-folk (consciously but casually dressed: shabby chic pants, camouflage hats, belly button length beards, etc.) but probably because Akron/Family followed, 2) their email list asked your gender, and 3) a guy in the crowd raised his hands up in the shape of a heart and kept flicking it at pretty-pretty but she didn’t (or refused to) notice