Nashville noise rockers Jeff The Brotherhood brought their travelling circus to town to bring the word on their new LP, Hypnotic Nights. Along for the ride were fellow Nashville denizens Diarrhea Planet and LA's Colleen Green. Over the course of the tour, all the bands seem to have found their niche to make it a perfect night out for the garage rock afficionnado.
Jeff The Brotherhood hit the stage and played a
structurally shambolic but musically hyper tight set, taking requests
from the lovable young rowdies in the front, and just plain getting it
on. Even in the noisy recesses of the Velvet Jones, you couldn't keep down their melodies, and ultimately that will be what keeps them on the road to what could be a slow steady Black Keys style rise to stardom. With stark lights cutting through a belching smoke machine and amps on full, Jeff The Brotherhood ran roughshod across their catalogue and put a punctuation mark on an excellent evening.
Diarrhea Planet
In the run up to the show, my major question was: "Can anyone possibly live up to the name Diarrhea Planet?" The answer turned out to be affirmative. It started with cramming four guitars onto the tiny stage, aping bad metal mannerisms-these guys punched all my hate buttons, but I could not hate. "Welcome to band practice..." was a sample of the droll in between song patter, and it all worked. The key word here is fun-these guys were genuinely enjoying being up there. They transcended the Skynyrd-isms to achieve a state of drunken grace that rivaled the Replacements. Turns out that it's a Diarrhea Planet, and we're just living on it. (If only the threatened cover of James Brown's "The Big Payback" had materialized...)
Colleen Green
A lady, her bass, and a drum machine-what more do you need, really. LA based Colleen Green is making waves and winning hearts opening this tour. On first blush, it's tempting to try to fill in the blank spots on the canvas, and imagine how it would be to have other instruments there, but as the set winds on, the sneakiness of her melodies becomes apparent, and then the realization is, how easy it would be to bury them. While Green has played in a variety of formats, the live versions were a revelation, and losing the buzzing guitar and stripping off the effects on her vocals added a nice bittersweet tinge. The set, spanning her LP Milo Goes To Compton and EP's Green One and Cujo, was short but sweet, with the final song standing out as the highlight. It occurred to me that even with two thirds of the bands remaining, it would have been very easy to listen to Colleen Green the rest of the night.
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