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| Photos by Adam Bubolz |
Chicago's The Ponys draw from a lot of different worlds, a lot of different bins at the cool record store: Jered Grummere and his bandmates take cues from old garage rock, 90's math and noise rock, and even a dash of unapologetic Brit-pop revival. Together they find a center to create amazingly hooky pop songs, which they then step on with more fuzz and guitar squeal than any band should and somehow, it still comes out catchy as hell. After three excellent albums (the most recent, 2007's Turn The Lights Out, on Matador) they're working on new material, and made the drive to Saint Paul to try out some of the newer songs at the Turf Club.
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| Adam Bubolz |
The Chambermaids started the evening off with amps cranked so loud it threatened to blow out the Turf's windows. That is not a complaint. While some bands waste time being loud for loud's sake, The Chambermaids serve up some well-crafted, gloom-edged post-punk with a meticulousness about how each piece of the puzzle sounds--certainly influenced by guitarist/singer/Old Blackberry Way owner Neil Weir's sound engineer skills--and they were cranked to near-flawlessness.
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| Adam Bubolz |
The Bombay Sweets, in just a few short months, has grown from mastermind Nathan Grumdahl knocking out a few songs at home one day to make a full band's worth of reverb-laden surf garage rock onstage all by himself. Last night's addition of Dynamiters/His Mischief drummer Jeff Brown along with the usual drum machine gave some welcome analog heft to the programmed beats, but the center, as always, was Grumdahl's vocals and guitar: both spare, both slightly haunted.
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| Adam Bubolz |
There was a certain raw, reckless abandon to France Has The Bomb's set that I've seen glimpses of before, but not as intense or sustained as it was this night. Maybe it was because singer/guitarist Srini Rahdakrishna, former bandmate of Grummere's back in Chicago (read the interview
here) seemed genuinely excited to be playing with old friends. Maybe it was because it was drummer Danny Henry's last show. Whatever it was, FHtB cranked out an effortless, buzzing set of rock and roll.
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| Adam Bubolz |
Finally, the Ponys took the stage late into the evening, Grummere's lanky frame towering over the crowd, as he and the rest of the band churned out song after song of fuzz-squeal-pop topped with echo-heavy vocals. The performance was great, but I had a small frustration: their stage lights flashed and shifted randomly at a seizure-inducing pace that distracted more than it enhanced--there wasn't any need to try to make the show when they should have just been the show. That brand of raw rock and roll that should kick your ass in a dark basement or at 3 a.m. after bar close with all the lights on, and the Ponys did just that, no extras required.
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