Last night I covered a Greenshoelace.com and Scion party, as it ran long and will most likely be cut, I wanted to preserve the two bands I wrote a lot about here for this entry.

update: The full review is now published.

BOTTLE UP AND GO

The opening act, Bottle Up and Go is a blues punk band that I first saw at CMJ. Back then I described them thusly; “old school blues rock stompers that not only burn down the barn they scatter its ashes, drink all your sour mash, destroy your still, defame your wife, deflower your daughter and make a man out of your son before riding off to the sunset on your horse.”

This is still accurate if a bit misleading for last night’s performance. Guitarist Keenan Mitchell’s wild intensity was on display as his unruly mane shook while fingers slid up and down his instrument’s neck like he was trying to choke the music out of it. Andrew Carrico primal baritone saxophone playing replaced the need for anything so standard as a bassist. The passion and fire were there, but hidden until their final song. After playing the planned set, the wildly enthusiastic audience took up cries of “One more! One more!” until the band relented.

Keenan saying with a smile “We’ve never played an encore before.”

Taking their name from Leadbelly and covering Otis Redding, their influences are clear, and they attack the eight bar blues as though they came to us from an alternate universe. One where punk rock didn’t grow out as a reaction to arena rock, but rather growing as a reaction to a blues overlord. If I say “blues punk” you’ll say “garage rock” which is close but also far enough away that you wouldn’t want to walk the distance between them.

Thanks to an issue with their record label, they didn’t have any copies of their releases available to buy, and a going to their MySpace page will get you four of their tracks, but you don’t want that. Encoded at 64 KPBS, you aren’t hearing the music anymore than if I tried to hum it to you. Gone is Andrew’s mighty sax work, gone is drummer Fareed Sajan’s intense snap percussion, and gone is the controlled chaos that is Keenan Mitchell’s guitar. See this band live. Period.

STREETLAB

I was intrigued by the headliner of the night, the Brooklyn-based dance music production team Streetlab, who takes pop culture hits and re-works them for the dance floor. They came to prominence with for Led Zepplin remix that got play on UK radio. I was expecting a DJ set; two guys, MIDI controllers, Parade of Hits loops and a sweaty crowd.

What they actually prepared was a hybrid live show / live PA. In addition to the expected DJ equipment there was a live drummer and a bassist to compliment the loops. The end result wasn’t quite Soulwax and it wasn’t quite 2 Many DJs.

The hybrid style worked against Streetlab. They would mix a few songs together and then stop. So the crowd could get in a handful of hard dancing only to abruptly have the beat yanked from beneath their feet. This start stop herky jerk treatment of their set made me wonder how often they’d done this.

Right away there were technical issues. Starting with the sound mix the bass was overblown, drowning out all other tracks. When that was fixed, there was an issue with the drum track loops, as each time a new loop was brought in, it was off beat resulting in a trainwreck. Added to this was the live drummer who seemed to have a delay in what he was being fed to headphones, so there were many, many times last night when there were three different tempos of drums coming from the speakers.

When it was all in sync though, it was pretty glorious. The samples were obvious but not jarring to the rest of the track, the live bass work was great, the drums added a human element to the quantized loops, and the technical issues that I noticed were lost on the dancers. Every track was an absolute stormer and while music played the crowd kept moving from start to finish.

A Post a day? How long can I keep this up?