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Blog Entry 50 of 55 The Lush Report

I'm trying to bring some of the more overlooked stuff from the local music scene. I have to balance it against a full-time real job, so I can't be as thorough as I'd like, but hopefully you'll find some of the stuff that Mark Brown and Ricardo Baca don't cover. If you've got a tip on a great venue for live music or great musicians to check out, e-mail me here. To bookmark this blog, click here.

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Teen idols and fine young cannibals

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Contributed by: John Zwick, YourHub.com on 9/10/2007

It was on recommendation from Connor Williams that I caught The Chain Gang of 1974 at the Marquis Theater on Sept. 8. Couldn't pick a better night, since the hyper-kinetic one-man dance band was playing with The Epilogues, Signal to Noise and The Swayback.

I'd last seen the Epilogues at Vaux's final show July 28, and there, they showed signs of transition from a decent, if unassuming, dour electric rock group with a few notes taken from The Killers to something bigger - something more explosive - in their last song of the night, a new one to be on an upcoming album. So this time around was like a progress report.

The new album's been plagued by delays, but after getting a new producer, the band sounded excited about it. In the meantime, they heavily cannibalized Vaux's stage show. It's an ugly word, cannibalize, but I don't have mean any malice by it. If anything, I'm glad to see that one part of Vaux, a band I pushed with slavish fanboy devotion, is still alive and kicking. The Epilogues had built their own set of lights - red fluorescent towers and flood lights pointing back at the stage. Instead of automated lighting, the whole thing is run in real-time, just like Vaux used to do. It gives the Epilogues a kind of creepy sterile look - very slick and very bleak.

The sound man seemed out of his depth, though, and things wouldn't get any better through Chain Gang of 1974.

It used to be a reliable metric to measure a band's quality against whether the fan base is disproportionately made up of teenage girls. But quality is quality, even if the Marquis did look more like a Tiger Beat convention (or a really aggressive episode of To Catch a Predator) when The Chain Gang of 1974 took the stage.

I like to think Chain Gang's Kamtin Mohager started the night with a rallying cry for an entire generation: "The iPod might die halfway through, but who cares; let's dance." Maybe I'm reading too heavily into it.

Kam made his way through a short set with a cowbell solo or two (!) and an invitation to everyone to get up on stage. His loyal army of adoring teenage girls complied. For all the sound problems, he still kicked beats that got the dance floor bouncing. That's no mere affectation. Get your own army of synchronized jumping teenage girls and you'll notice the dance floor bends beneath you on the beat. Do it sober, though. The synaesthetic oomph of a bouncing floor and thumping bass might otherwise knock you to your backside.

It was Chain Gang's last show before a mini-tour of the west coast. He'll be back to Colorado toward the second week of October. A night of mushy sound, ugly feedback and uneven bass isn't much of a proper send-off, but the kids didn't seem to care.

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