Tag: The Shivas

If you need the musical equivalent of a quality pint with a good friend, The Bug Club is here to serve.

Once upon a time, the Jesus Lizard was about as subtle as a candy-coated cinderblock. These days, well, they’re about the same. Tonight, they introduce things with a speculative reminiscence that is measured, philosophical, and yet somewhat menacing.

Tonight’s opening theme is clearly tribute to the Imaginary City — the opening cover is from the town’s The Streetwalkin’ Cheetahs, who are named after an Iggy and the Stooges lyric and have been pumping out a corresponding racket for about 30 years now. The song itself, originally by X, is about a friend of the band that left for England to hook up with the Damned’s Captain Sensible. The lore is unclear on whether the Captain was expecting that or not.

The three-piece punchy pop formula should be familiar to everyone by now, but the sounds of Bad Bad Hats are an elegant proof of their own.

Tonight started out with an hour of the sickest music around, which is to say songs about illness, medication, and other health-related issues. The following two hours were the usual incomprehensible mixture of genres and bad attitudes.

Exquisite rock and roll, filled with bombastic drenches of reverb and enough monster riffs to fill a stadium, powering through sounds psychedelic, surf-like, and power-chording, but with enough dynamics to keep it from becoming exhausting.

This show kicks off with a one hour special entitled "Under The Waves" — songs about swimming, sinking, and other water-related activities. Somewhere in there we hear from The Elected, who are desperately missed.

If you got The Nude Party to perform at your next get-together, it would be the kind of shindig that produces two marriages, three break-ups, and gossip for years to come.

Listening to Fantastic Negrito is like lifting the lid on a simmering pot to a wonderfully exotic yet very familiar blend of spices.

Getting into Darra Adam Khel had not been easy. Getting into Pakistan was relatively straightforward, with the right-colored passports and decoy suitcases full of Western tourist necessities. The ride towards the Khyber Pass had been less so, and the necessary disguises and bribes to get past the checkpoints that turned away foreigners were more of an ordeal than ordinary. The dusty vehicle, neither truck nor passenger car nor jeep but somehow all three, had been recalcitrant for most of the trip, providing constant frequent minor breakdowns, keeping the mechanic perpetually busy. Now they were on a shooting range on the roof of a well-stocked arms shop, surrounded by dozens of identical shops and shooting ranges. As the linguist lifted the replica Berthier carbine to their shoulder, they darkly thought it would be just their luck, after all of this, to be caught in some rooftop crossfire from other purchasers testing their new toys.