Best Journalistic Leftovers

Once again, here's something I wrote for the school paper. It's my review of the Some Girls show last week. Remember how I had all those pictures, but not many words? Here's the revenge of the words, brace yourselves:

If there’s anything I like, it’s a band with a mission statement. Some Girls, a San Diego band made up of members of the Locust, American Nightmare, Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower, and Unbroken, is a band with a mission statement, to say the least. According to their drummer, Sal Gallegos:

“Basically, we wanted to brutalize people and have each song punch people in the face and not let up until they were choking on their own blood. None of this eyeliner-wearing, cupcake stuff—just putting listeners’ open ears on the curb and stomping on their heads.”

That quote, and having heard a few Some Girls tracks on a few compilation CDs, was all it took to get my curiosity up enough to make a trip out to North Six last Thursday night to see the band in action. Also, I don’t suppose that it hurt that tickets were less than ten bucks and I don’t have classes on Fridays.

One of the main things I wondered on my way to the show was what the crowd was going to be like. The music that Some Girls is most easily classifiable as some sort of offshoot of punk, hardcore, and thrash metal—not exactly the type of music I associate with the average Williamsburg hipster. I wondered if North Six would be filled by members of some punk scene that I didn’t really know existed—kind of how whenever I see a band like the Cramps, Einsturzende Neubauten, or Bauhaus the show is filled with aged Goths who’ve grown a little too plump for their pleather and I have to wonder where these people go when the sun comes up. Anyway, when I got to North Six I found it to be filled (but by no means to capacity) by the usual Brooklyn kids in Chuck Taylors and black hooded sweatshirts with no more than three thuggish hardcore enthusiasts to be found in the crowd. I should have known better than to be surprised.

Despite the unthreatening crowd, Some Girls (who really didn’t look too different from your average hipster band) delivered “music” to match their mission statement, “song” after very, very loud “song” where each number seemed say “If you thought that last number was hard to listen to, check this out.” In fact, the entire evening seemed to be a nearly scientific examination in how far too far could go, how much louder too loud could get, and how much faster too fast could be. It stopped being a concert and started being a game, the music stopped being threatening and started being fun. Despite the fact that the band’s front man, Wes Eisold, was screaming himself hoarse on each song and that the guitarists appeared to be breaking a string or two with each song, there was something lighthearted and very safe about this show that was supposed to be an experiment in brutality. Most of the audience just stood silently (you could hear a pin drop between songs) with wry smiles on their faces while a few enthusiastically “sang” along to each song (which was odd to me as “singing along” would mean that the songs had actual lyrics, and I don’t mean to sound like you Grandma, but it just sounded like screaming to me). At one point one of the show’s few actual hardcore enthusiasts (if you can’t tell, I “hardcore” isn’t meant to modify enthusiasm here, it’s being used to name a musical genus) began running back and forth through the crowd with fists swinging, set on starting not a mosh pit but a circle of slam dancing—but the result was more like the Tasmanian Devil whirling his way through a forest of skinny, bespectacled hipster trees, in other words, a one-sided and absolute massacre.

For the band’s final song, a chanting of the word “Ape” accompanied by the usual instrumental loudness of the evening (plus a second drummer just for that number), Eisold pulled most of the audience up onto North Six’s small stage one by one(and it was at this time that I realized he only had one arm), eventually falling off the stage when it got too crowded, leaving him to finish his chant from a seated position on the club’s floor. As an anthropological examination, the Some Girls show was something to see, and as a night out, it was a little fun.

And here's your reward for reading that whole thing (or just scrolling down through it), one of the videos that I took at the show. Just watch it over and over for an hour and you'll practically have been to a Some Girls concert. If you're not too intersted in seeing the band in action, you still might want to download this video (it's a big file, 26mb or so) to see how big the videos my new camera takes are. Look at me, bragging.