Just because Pride weekend 2021 had already come and gone didn’t mean there was room for more queer celebration, because there is ALWAYS room for more queer celebration. And that was exactly the scene when the night kicked off for the “Wish You Were Queer” end of Pride celebration at Our Wicked Lady on Tuesday June 29. Performing were queer artists Cristy Road (of pop punk greats Choked Up), sad indie Tenderheart Bitches, and the energetic power trio Talay. The night was MC’d by drag and burlesque performer C’etait Bontemps who performed between sets and later wowed the crowd rocking out to 90s hits during the karaoke finale of Talay’s set.
Cristy Road got the night rolling with an acoustic set, which saw her belting stripped down versions of tracks from her band Choked Up aka a “pop punk Telenovela,” as well as some newer material. She punctuated her set with stories about the songs and fun quips about astrology much to the delight of the audience (because queers love astrology, this I can confirm!). For her final song, she performed sans guitar and sang with the accompaniment of a guest drummer, aka me. It was an impromptu last minute thing we decided on the night of the gig but I’m always down to play drums and I definitely had a lot of fun joining her on stage to be a part of the celebration as well. Choked Up is currently working on new music and will be recording a new album soon, due out in 2022.
Tenderheart Bitches took the stage next for a set that ranged dynamically from loud to soft and back again, often times all within the same song. This push and pull kept the crowd in rapt attention throughout, even during the quietest passages where you could otherwise almost hear a pin drop. The band has been working on new music and released their debut single “Blood Orange” the day after the show which is available to stream via their Spotify.
Talay headlined the night and hit the ground running as soon as they strummed the first note. The energetic trio hammered away at song after song of infectious and catchy power pop that had the crowd singing along every step of the way. By the end of their set, the line between audience and performer blurred even more as things evolved into a karaoke party when enthusiastic friends and fans grabbed the mic to sing 90s hits like “Come To My Window” by Melissa Etheridge and closed down the show with an epic version of “You Outta Know” by Alanis Morissette. And I don’t know about you, but I am always a sucker for a 90s singalong.
Pride month may be fading into the distance for 2021, but this night proved that at every level, we need to be supporting and nurturing queer artists from local talents such as these, up to the bigger players on the national scene. If I know anything, I know that queer artists are needed and vital 365 days a year, and that music fans can keep this conversation going any day, any time- regardless of whether or not corporate sponsors are marketing it for a branding opportunity or covering themselves in rainbow for a month.
Scroll down for pics of the show (photos by Kate Hoos)
As the sound of motorcycles revving and the mighty pounding drums of Fogo Azul echoed through the streets at 5pm sharp on Saturday June 26th, it was the signal that the 29th annual NYC Dyke March was kicking off. Returning this year to an in person march after the Covid-19 pandemic forced the 2020 march to be cancelled, the march once again took over 5th Avenue in Manhattan heading south from Bryant Park to Washington Square Park.
The theme of the 2021 march was Black Dyke Power, and even as a joyous event, it remains a political protest march where corporations and cops are not invited or welcomed. While the NYPD does show up on the edges of the march, security and crowd management is and has always been handled by groups of dedicated marshals and volunteers who keep the participants safe along the way.
Marchers laughed and embraced along the route- couples, friends, and families all participating with radical rebellion evident in every smile and cheer. Even as Pride becomes more mainstream (read “marketable”), hundreds of signs and shirts emblazoned with political slogans left no doubt to passersby that this wasn’t just a party for the sake of fun and donning some rainbow swag, but a protest- a massive force of dykes declaring a taking back of space with bold and uncompromising queerness.
When the march reached 23rd St, things slowed to a halt as several moments of silence were observed in a powerful tribute to Black trans lives lost. As the motorcycles revved up once more to signal that the march was starting up again, this was unfortunately the point where I had to head out of the march to go to Brooklyn to shoot another Pride event. While I was disappointed to miss out on the fun of splashing in the fountain at Washington Square Park, I relished every single moment I got to be at the march amongst so many other dykes celebrating our queerness as we see fit, without the interference of corporations or cops, truly joy as an act of resistance.
Scroll down to see pics from the march (warning, some NSFW)
Go Skateboarding Day and Make Music New York both come around every year on June 21st and draw scores of enthusiastic participants. Go Skateboarding Day is an event to celebrate- you guessed it- skateboarding and skate culture, as well as to encourage more people to get involved with the sport. MMNY is a city wide festival of free pop up concerts performed outdoors in public parks, plazas, and in front of participating businesses. While not directly affiliated with each other, music and skateboarding definitely go hand in hand, and punk has always been closely linked to skating, so it was only natural for a punk show to happen in the late afternoon merging the festivities in a public plaza in Brooklyn. The bill featured intersectional feminist skate punk Witch Slap (aka the band I play drums in) progressive black metal Prostitution (who organized the event) and was headlined by hardcore punks Rebelmatic.
Under the blazing afternoon sun, Witch Slap kicked things off as skaters rolled up to settle in for the show. From my position behind the drum kit, I watched as the crowd grew as we played and got particularly into our ode to women/girl skateboarders “She Shredder Revolution” which we paired back to back with a cover of the Black Flag classic “Nervous Breakdown.” The heat was pretty wicked but it didn’t slow us down and it definitely didn’t stop people from dancing and skating while we played, hitting tricks to joyous cheers and applause. When our set was done, I caught my breath for a few minutes, chugged A LOT of water, then set to work grabbing shots of Prostitution and Rebelmatic who both put on blistering sets, not letting the scorching heat slow them down one bit either.
Prostitution powered through a set of thrash-gazey originals, complete with a few fun covers including the Van Halen classic “Panama,” and a heeeavy version of “Take On Me” by the 80s one hit wonders Aha. If they were tired from a long day of skating and working on getting the event set up, they didn’t let on, shredding through song after song without letting up.
Rebelmatic closed out the day and this band truly never ever runs on anything less than 110%; even with the fierce heat, this show was no exception. They are one of the hardest working bands in the NYC DIY scene today, organizing outdoor events on a regular basis and inviting other DIY locals to play, almost single handedly keeping the flame alive during the latter part of 2020 when any kind of live music was still so scarce. As the sun began to dip lower in the sky, they tore through a set of fan favorites like “Born To Win,” from their 2020 release Ghost In The Shadows, and “Feel Some Type of Way,” and “Don’t Shoot” both from the 2020 EP Eat The Monster, bringing the day to a close with a hard hitting, intensely exhuberant coda.
godheadsilo- thee friendship village e.p.
Kill Rock Stars 211
7inch vinyl 1993
godheadsilo is one of those bands where I am right in the weird grey area of having been just a bit too young to have seen them play live during their heyday in the mid to late 90s, as they likely would not have been playing on a NJ pop punk bill back then, and that was the only way I was able to see live music at the time. My world was more limited back then in terms of where I could go since I couldn’t drive yet (and the internet being a much smaller and more primitive place at the time too), so there was no way I would have seen them or had much access to hear them anywhere else other than a VFW type show in my immediate area… which to my knowledge they never played a show like that in Northern NJ during my time of attending DIY shows as a teen.
They went on hiatus for several years starting in the late 90s after drummer Dan Haugh suffered a catastrophic hand injury that left him unable to play for many years, and when they re-united for a show in 2015 and a later tour in 2017, I was still too unfamiliar with them for it to have piqued my interest at the time (though if I could go back in time four years….).
I also admit I probably wasn’t ready for something like this in the 90s anyway because like many teens of that era getting into punk and underground music, I cut my teeth first on pop punk and ska, which was very abundant at the time and are very accessible genres, and something like this I would have had to mature into a bit I think. I definitely saw the name many times over the years- mostly in Kill Rock Stars and/or Sub Pop ads and inserts in the 90s and then sporadically later on, but never gave them a listen to relatively recently.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown to love experimental and noisy stuff, heavily distorted bass and drum bands particularly, so while in their heyday my teenage self would have preferred a pop punk record, this is now something that I will reach for again and again before I ever touch a pop punk record. (I do still like the early Lookout! stuff but really can miss just about everything else in the genre from about 1994 onward.)
How I came to explore them more finally is that they randomly came up on a playlist during the early Covid lockdowns, I think specifically while listening to Lightning Bolt. Spotify suggested them to me on the “radio” feature, I loved what I heard and got invested in listening to them since I had all the time in the world to dig into stuff extensively and really ended up enjoying what I was hearing.
This specific EP I acquired on Discogs a few months ago for a couple of bucks after tearing through all of the albums available on streaming services. While not my favorite thing I’ve listened to by them- that would be the 1996 album Skyward In Triumph– I do dig it and really love the aesthetic of the artwork. All four songs could work well in any of their other albums, and being their first release (aside from a 1992 comp track), it serves as a nice little intro to what the band would go on to do so well throughout their all too brief career: the huge walls of sound, the whisper to scream distorted vocals, the noisy interludes, the massive pounding of the drums. The blueprint is all right there in this EP.
In an interview that came out during their 2017 tour, both band members gave different answers as to what the future of the band could or would be, one seeming to want to do more, the other being non committal. You can read that interview here and speculate, but as of right now, nothing more has come from the band. Perhaps the closest thing might have been Three Men and a Baby, which was a long lost album that bassist Mike Kunka recorded with The Melvins in 1998 under the moniker Mike & The Melvins that finally saw the light of day in 2016.
Listen to the EP below. (Note- whoever uploaded this to YouTube reversed the side order and the two songs from the B side “You Must Pay” and “Precipice of Ice,” actually play first before the two songs from the A side “Friendship Village,” and “Master of Balance.” They also listed the tracks in the wrong order in the description)
One of the things that was important to me when starting this blog was to give a space to write about some of the obscure and/or random music I have collected over the years, as well as some of the more quirky and weird stuff I have accumulated too and the odd random piece of merch or other interesting ephemera. A lot of the music I do have in physical format, but some only in the digital realm and never had in a physical form. The one thing that unites it all is that all are things that likely are not to be talked about very much in other music blogs.
Sure I want to have reviews of new releases and show coverage and all the good stuff. But to me, the really good stuff is a long dissolved band I saw once in 1998 and I got their demo tape, or a 7inch with a grainy black and white cover that a band put out in the late 80s before promptly dropping off the face of the earth, leaving me to find their record in a run down shop for $2 in 1995. Or even much more recent things like one-off Bandcamp projects that 12 other people downloaded at the time. And let us not forget the gems of thrift stores or the used bins of far off record stores I have gotten to explore while touring (or the demos by bands I got to play with along the way).
So this is the place for it, the Undercroft, where I will pick random things from my collection that I enjoy, to not only talk about about why I like it, but share how I came to acquire it (if I know/remember…and there’s a good chance that I will) or any particular memories around it either as a physical item or the music itself; not much is really off limits here. The other FTA staff members may join in from time to time as well.
I will also to the very best of my ability share a link so you can hear said music too (or peppy workout record from the 70s…I went through a phase, it was a whole thing…) and invite your thoughts on it as well. These are all things that have stuck with me for one reason or another, maybe I loved something or maybe I just couldn’t stand to throw it away. But the common thread is I either want to bring wider attention to it, or giggle at myself over it (see above RE workout records). In any case, I look forward to sharing some of this epic randomness with with you so stay tuned!
