Ah, Grog Shop, someday I’ll learn not to be fooled by your posted show times. Someday, I will learn that in Grogspeak, 8 p.m. means “sometime after 10”. But enough of my kvetching. How about some fucking rock ‘n’ roll?
HotChaCha
HotChaCha are like an answer to my prayers – or, at least, a solution to the complaint I’ve made in this blog before about all the twee girly girls in music today. Singer Jovana Batkovic is probably more manly than most of the other men who hit the stage Monday night. Taller, too. Her long-legged presence, mic-phallic gyrations, forays into the audience and rolling around on the stage bring an undeniably entertaining aspect to HotChaCha’s live show, but it’s not covering up or compensating for anything else. Her energy feeds off of and perfectly complements the punk-spirited rock churned out by this four-piece. At once at ease and energetic, HotChaCha’s vigorous show is a credit to Cleveland, to women in rock and to the spirit of rock in general.
Freedom
To be honest, I think I didn’t quite get Freedom. After hauling out enough drums, guitars, pedals and padded Kustom amps to make the Grog Shop stage look like a music showroom, it felt like Freedom never quite capitalized on all that gear. In the end, it felt like a lot of noise that never coalesced into anything other than noise.
A Place to Bury Strangers
They will tell you A Place to Bury Strangers is a loud band. They will tell you to wear earplugs. They are not to be trusted. Yes, APtBS are loud. Gloriously loud. But fuck the earplugs. APtBS should be experienced without barrier.
From the surf-rock opening of “Deadbeat” to the free-for-all ending of “Ocean”, an A Place to Bury Strangers show is about being ensconced in sound – not experiencing it from a safe distance, with you here in the audience and the music there on stage. It is about the sound waves rattling against your bones. It is about feeling your brain swim in your head. It’s about the rainbow tracers left in your peripheral vision by what may just be the APtBS light/media show but may also be the music taking control of your cortex. It’s about sounds so intense and unexpected that your heart races and your breath catches. It’s about leaving the mundane world and entering sound.
