A couple of weeks ago I went to Los Angeles on vacation. On my last Saturday night in town, I went out to The Smell in downtown LA, to hear Crazy Band, The Audacity, and White Fence. Ty Segall was also playing, but as you will see I didn’t stay for their whole set, so the most I can tell you about them was that my note-to-self was “Interesting, investigate further at another time.”
But let us start at the beginning, with Crazy Band:
They are a punk band, and they are mostly girls. The lone exception is their drummer, who sadly didn’t make it into any of my pictures. I didn’t know anything about them when I arrived, so I had no idea what to expect. Here is what I got: music that was definitely all punk and no pop, in which I detected echoes of the X-Ray Specs (here’s 39 second example) and a set that was carefully controlled chaos, as band members passed the mic between songs and the kids around me moshed amid flying pieces of crumpled magazine pages tossed out over the crowd like gigantic pieces of confetti.
This is the pit, in the middle of a song:
This is the place afterwards:
It was amazing. Should you find yourself in LA, you should see them. Also, check out saxophonist Jenna Thornhill’s website, which is also full of good stuff.
The Audacity was next. They are from Fullerton, CA, and their sound, while a little bit bigger and bouncier than Crazy Band, was also punk rock. The moshing continued apace, with people joining hands to spin in gleeful circles and, later, rolling around on the floor.
They are out on tour at the moment, and as of right now they have upcoming shows in Seattle, Portland, and Oakland before they drop back down to Los Angeles. Go and hang out with them, Pacific Northwest and Northern California, you’ll have a good time.
The last band I saw was White Fence (also at Facebook), one of the many projects of Tim Presley of Darker My Love and The Strange Boys.
White Fence just put out a new record Is Growing Faith, through Woodsist Records, and are also on tour right now, with Woods, making a slow progression across the Southwest and up the East Coast. Recorded, they’re sort of groovy and psychedelic with the occasional burst of surf/garage rock; live, they’re surf rock at high punk speed. Either way, I like it a whole lot, and I look forward to seeing them again when they stop in New York in a week or so.
This is more or less where the crowd really went nuts. Someone else got video of the craziness, but, after I wriggled my way out of the pit and flattened myself against a wall to observe the chaos from afar, I got this picture as the pit surged forward:
Afterwards I felt a bit sweaty and squashed, and so decamped to the couches in the front of the venue for a little while – long enough to hear two Ty Segall songs – before I decided to call it an evening and head out. I will leave you with some shots of the view from the couches:
