When I was still a bright young college student one of my favorite things about coming back to the city for summer vacation was hanging out and partying with my slightly older 20 something friends, most often on the east side, frequenting parties and being cooler than thou in Echo Park and Silverlake. This meant, of course, that we went to our fair share of hole in the wall clubs, dives, and house parties in which some mediocre or just plain awful band provided the evening's entertainment.
I'm not sure the venue, but on one such occasion, my friends and I were "fortunate" enough to catch a headlining set by Los Angeles's own noise-rock outfit, the Mae Shi. And noise it was. A lot of shrieking, thrashing about, banging on instruments [literally], and shouting disguised as avant garde indie rock-n-roll in tight jeans and expensive haircuts. It was everything the hipster [and I guess "blipster] scene is criticized for brought to life. And get this, the audience was actually eating it up. But really, who's completely surprised by that, I mean this pales in comparison to that one party we attended where a noise rock trio took up the center of a warehouse space, gathering quite a crowd of onlookers, and head bobbers. I am sure it was only because the lead singer was thrashing about the dirty warehouse floor, mic in hand, sans clothes. Yes, NAKED. If that's not avant garde I don't know what is, right? That's some Yoko Ono in her prime type shit right there.
But I digress.
So imagine my surprise when I headed over to stereogum this afternoon and found two new Mae Shit tracks. First off, I didn't know they had it like that and second of it all, much to my amazement, the boys in the band do indeed know what a melody is. Thank God. The songs are actually listenable and enjoyable because of it. Keep this up fellas and I might press play in the not too distant future. But don't hold me to that.
2 comments:
Yes, we hoot and scream and can barely play our instruments, but we don't have expensive haircuts. 5/6 of us cut our own hair.
-myspace.com/themaeshi
Sorry about that and thanks for the correction. You get going about hipsters and scenes and you get all stereotypical and cliche. My bad. Years ago and I was probably inebriated. Digging the new tracks though.
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