Hello Indie Rokkers,
Yesterday was a fun night with many wins, sadly there were no wins from Brian Matusz on my fantasy team and he will soon experience the foul sting of the waiver wire upside his head. The two wins I experienced were courtesy of the SB Chicken Ranch and also from Freelance Whales, who conveniently played two blocks from the eatery. While I could describe the joys of simple pinto beans, Spanish rice and mesquite BBQ’d chicken I will instead talk more about the show. Here’s a quick vid of Freelance Whales in Austin and I think it’s good if we start with this because it’s sort of awesome.
First up Jensen’s is a small little space which probably would fit about 85-100 kidz fairly easily and last night was probably pushing the lower end of that figure so we all had lots of room to dance (please note that the verb “dance” here is intended to connote the hipster-leg-wobble-and-occasional-head-bob as opposed to say, this). The evening began with a charming little SB based brother-sister acoustic-pin-drop-core-(term-I-just-made-up) tandem named Watercolor Paintings which was a fun way to start the show with JayMay style broken vocals and harp plucking, tongue in cheek lyrics. Fun stuff.
After a wonderfully brief intermission Freelance Whales took the stage and began with “Generator ^ First Floor” and killed it. Five pieces are sometimes unwieldy on stage but with so many instruments (glockenspiel, two keyboards, banjo, squeezebox, besides the obvious and expected) and so many equipment switches between songs there’s always something fun going on. And for reals—for a bunch of white guys (and girl) there’s some serious soul. Describing a band’s sound is pretty passé with everything you’d want to know about a band available online but it’s safe to say they fall into that generally uncategorizable (apparently not a word) indie rock with electric and folk elements that all the kidz these days flip for. Stage presence is clearly not their strong suit as these New Yorkians based the majority of their stage time swapping instruments around as opposed to cracking wise, which is of course fine and all and certainly preferable to idle prater but maybe a joke or two would be nice. Or not, whatever. It’s really the only criticism I can think of. Besides the aforementioned “Generator ^ First Floor”, “Ghosting”, and especially “Starring” destroyed it. They ended the night with a rousing version of “Generator ^ Second Floor” which sent us out into the tragically foggy night and our Mazda 3s, which of course smelled like leftover Chicken Ranch.
