Birdshot: Budos Band, Go! Team, Grunge Zombies

BU-Dos, Budos Band, Budosbudosbudos Band
This past friday, I went to see the Budos Band play at the World Cafe Live.
World Cafe, operated by XPN, is a venue on which I am very conflicted. In a nutshell...

The Good:
Fantastic sound quality (esp. downstairs), great beer selection, cleverly designed spaces with lots of nooks and crannies, interesting artwork, central to downtown/easy to walk to from most of the city.

The Bad:
HORRIBLE acts 95% of the time. Not a big surprise given the link to XPN, which was spayed/neutered about 15 years ago. Lots of pretentious middle aged showgoers, lots of sitting around, not lots of dancing.

So, with that in mind, I arrived with low expectations... I was really excited to see Budos, who I've hyped in this space as an Africanized Morphine, but worried that the crowd would remain seated and indifferent to their infectious grooves. The result? The band is as advertised, though with quite a bit of Ska, and quite a bit of repetitiveness, and less funk than I initially thought. Very fun to dance to, if you (like me), were one of the 30 people who cleared out a small area up front to shake it. They had a ton of energy, and were clearly having a ball. Seeing a band having a ton of fun together is perhaps more infectious than good beats. They had both, and I was happy. That said, I strongly doubt the band's staying power. Without lyrics, you need to have some pretty broad range in your sound (see: Davis, Miles), or else all your songs start sounding the same (see G, Kenny). I fear that Budos may wind up in the same pile with late-term Ska, or, to be brutally honest, the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

The Go! Team
They are coming. We cannot get out.
10/26 at the Starlight Ballroom (aka the Bar-mitzvah Dome).
Big ups to R5 productions for securing the Go! Team again on this their second go-round of the U.S. Last year's show, also at Starlight, was without a doubt the highlight of the show calendar 2006, and I couldn't be more excited for this show. Double props to R5 for keeping the show affordable at $12.

Grunge Zombies will kill us all
Look, I understand that fashion is cyclical. That there's only so much one can do with a pair of jeans. I enjoyed, for a time, the 70's revival, with lots of browns and oranges, Ben Wallace's afro, bands playing organs again, and the fuzz guitar stylings of Kasabian. Then the industry moved on, and attempted to foist skinny black jeans and oversized sweaters on us again. And it fucking worked. Look people, skinny black jeans are fucking terrible. NO ONE looks good in them. And your new wave haircut? You might as well tattoo "douche" to your forehead. But hey, at least we got something good out of the 80's revival. We got The Knife. I've been joking for a while that the inevitable next step is a grunge revival. And with a sighting of Eddie Vedder last week, riding Dennis Rodman like a goddamn giraffe, the writing was on the wall. Well, as of this morning, the writing is literally on the wall.

Yup. Get ready for Nirvana cover bands at the Manayunk Brew Pub, and lots of girls not showing their breasts.

Fuck.