Earth to Doris
This week, I’m piling on y’all some of the concert reviews I got from friends and colleagues before I went on my little road adventure (proving in the process that everyone writes better than I do). Here’s a great one from a show that took place at a club somewhere on Main Street sometime in early July. It’s by hard-boiled Pitch theater critic Alan “a Dale” Scherstuhl.
It wasn’t the Martini Madness dance crowd thrown off last night at the slick, silly new Grand Emporium. (Those red lights they have up everywhere, which are supposed to be kinda sexy, remind me way too much of the logo for Cars.) No, the confusion was among the Immobile Indie Guys, those icy rockers who stand around as though they’ve pissed off that witch from Narnia. They had to knock off their Subliminal Head Bobbing before
Doris Henson got to its big finish (which I hoped would be “The Power”) because the band got shut down by Grand Emporium staffers. At 11, the Emporium transformed from Autobot rock joint to Decepticon dance club, with staffers putting up that church-basement wall to separate bar from dance floor. Yes, I know I’m mixing metaphors, moving from robots to Sunday school, and, yes, I know it’s unfair to characterize the new Emporium as Decepticon evil, as I’ve enjoyed some serious ass-shaking there, but we really wanted one more song. Just one. Please. We even waited through mopey old String & Return and its atmospheric mush. (The band seemed oddly out of sync, the drummer never really locking with the rest of the band.)
That just made DH sound better: brash, tight and cocky in that way Matt Dunehoo excels at — the way he always makes it look as though he doesn’t give a shit when obviously he truly does, to the bottom of his eternal soul. Powered, as always, by that driving groove from Byron Collum (bass) and Wes Gartner (drums), DH strikes me as the one band of local white boys that actually gets why bands have bass players. You can dance to these bastards!
Not that anybody did, though. The world would be a better place if the dance-club crowd could shake to it instead of haunting the corners and if the Immobile Indies would break from their social-anxiety bubbles and maybe stick around long enough to give Martini Madness a chance.
Back to DH and the new song with the name I didn’t catch. (It’s not my job to catch new song names.) It crunched real good, built to crazy peaks, and was packed with chorsues more fleshed out than half of DH’s staples. A winner.
