Crazy and the Brains/The Due Diligence/Shivering Timbers at Now That’s Class, Cleveland, OH, 1.13.11
Crazy and the Brains
Imagine: You’re in a chilly punk bar, the kind with band stickers all over the walls, along with a little graffiti, and bike quarter pipes along the back of the room. There’s four-piece punk band on stage whose line-up includes xylophone. The band starts up, and a crowd comes dancing in, some of whom look like they were shipped in from the suburbs. There is a conga line at one point.
This was my cognitive dissonance-inducing introduction to not only Now That’s Class (a nice little venue with good acoustics and a laid-back vibe – easy to see why they received more than one nod in Scene’s most recent “best of” round-up), but also Crazy and the Brains. The audience, who had apparently been priming themselves at the bar for a while, was ready to dance, and CatB supplied just the right soundtrack with their bright, high-energy punk rock. While their originals, like “Birthday Song” and “Saturday Night Live”, were well-received, the most popular song of their set was a scream-along cover of “I Want Candy”.