Varsity Drag, The Suicide Dolls, Unholy III and The I Want You | Midway Cafe, JP | 1 Dec.

Rock fans, lend us your ears. Yes, yes, we stole the image above, for you young people that there is a detail of the cover art from AC/DC's brilliant 1976 set Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. But that's not why we've called you here. You are no doubt aware of the big, big rock show tomorrow evening, that being the apparently not-yet-sold-out Dinosaur Jr. bill at The Paradise, a show that will most certainly sell out now that The Sinclair has had to postpone the competing Titus Andronicus bill. But perhaps you are less familiar with your options for Saturday? This will not stand, because there is a mighty, mighty show occurring down in Jamaica Plain at Midway Cafe Saturday night.

Top-lining the evening are indie punk stalwarts Varsity Drag, Clicky Clicky faves who many readers likely saw early this month delivering a dominating set -- basically spur-of-the-moment -- at the big Clicky Clicky Community Servings Benefit Show. We heard two new numbers from Ben Deily and his henchpersons that night, and the band is promising to play some other newies this weekend to boot. Varsity Drag has recently gone back into the studio with storied producer Tom Hamilton, so it would seem the beast is stirring once more. Speaking of things beastly, that brings us to the main support for the night, Connecticut's own stoner punks The Suicide Dolls, who impressed us greatly -- particularly their totally sick drummer -- at the Tiger Mountain show in September. Also performing Saturday are The Unholy III, which features punk lifer Kevin Stephenson formerly of The Shods and et cetera, as well as garagey Boston upstarts The I Want You, whose recent video for the tune "Three Short Days" kept us amused for easily about that long a few weeks ago. Let us not belabor the point. This is going to be a hot one. Hit the embeds below for a taste of what you've got coming to you, then click over to the Facebook event page to digest the deets and pledge your allegiance.

Today's Hotness: Hush Delirium, Infinity Girl

>> While certain indie rock elder statesperson are content to mount nostalgic (and sometimes quite lucrative) reunion shows, Mark Gardener of early 90's British shoegaze titans Ride has taken an interesting alternate route. After an "exile" from music following the dissolution of Ride, and with only sporadic forays since, Mr. Gardener has returned -- not with a band, however, but rather as co-curator of a music and art collective called Hush Delirium. The cohort's aptly titled debut The Taster is a self-released effort (and for a limited time, free to download here) bearing a nifty premise. Musicians within the collective each compose an atmospheric piece that is then used as inspiration for a painting. The result is a multimedia installation that tours galleries bringing shoegaze-inspired aural headspace to arts patrons, and presumably anyone else who walks through the door. Among others, the collective features the art of Hush Delirium founder Simon Welford, whose artwork is likely familiar to Ride fans. Other participating musicians include Adam Franklin of Swervedriver, Aziz Ibrahim of The Stone Roses and Dean Garcia of Curve, making this elite new club one of the swirliest and psychedelic currently going. Gardener's own piece on The Taster, "3rd Floor Elevation," grooves on a Brian Jonestown Massacre-styled, heroin-cool groove, while Mr. Ibrahim's "Heavens Rain" is a meditative sitar instrumental that echoes the wanderings of The Rolling Stones circa Their Satanic Majesties Request. The Cult of Dom Keller and SPC ECO (a moniker used by the aforementioned Mr. Garcia) turn in more traditional songs. One of the real gems on this set, however, is Jaq Gallier's rainy, female-led "Wild Is The Wind." Opening with ambient vocal sibilance and lilting background hums, the brief, almost-folksy tune works marvels with a gentle minimalism. Overall, The Taster is a great introduction to a hopefully thriving multimedia enterprise from an exciting community of artists merging their influences and styles as a means of looking forward instead of back. -- Edward Charlton



>> Boston-based shoegaze giants Infinity Girl today revealed details about a forthcoming EP. The quartet will self-release next week the short collection Just Like Lovers, which includes five songs and is the band's second official release of the year; the quartet issued its brilliant full-length debut Stop Being On My Side in May [review]. The new set (whose cover art you can inspect here) includes the tunes "Untitled (July)," "Taking Nothing," "Read Yr Mind," "Summer Gold" and "Not My Hang," and it will be feted with a sure-to-be-tremendous release show next week featuring Boston(-area) scene luminaries including power blues drone lords The New Highway Hymnal, noise rock behemoths Soccer Mom and the brilliant guitar wranglers Speedy Ortiz, who Monday celebrated the anniversary of the band's very first show. The release show next week at TT The Bear's Place in Cambridge, Mass., may be one of the few remaining times we'll see Infinity Girl before drummer Sebastian Modak leaves the country for an extended period, so all the more reason to get out and see this ridiculously great slate of bands. Full details of the show are at this Facebook event page, so click over and pledge your allegiance. We are given to understand that Just Like Lovers will be mastered between now and next week, and we hope to have some sort of music to share with you before too long. In the meantime, there's always Stop Being On My Side, which we encourage you to revisit via the embed below.

Rock Over Boston: Ted Leo With Bent Shapes | 26 Nov.

[Ted Leo and Bent Shapes at a house show in Brighton, MA to benefit 826 Boston on 11/26/2012. Photos by Michael Piantigini.]

Reviewed: Big Dipper, Banquet Hall

Big Dipper Crashes On The Platinum Planets' second track should have been its first. It's a lament, but also a prayer of sorts to activate the muse for this, the first new Big Dipper album in over 20 years (sort of) - hoping for "voices that guide a rising chorus that opens wide!" So goes Gary Waleik's "Robert Pollard," which worries that a classic era of songwriters like namechecked Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Jagger-Richards, and Newmans both Randy and Colin, is coming to end and all hope lies with Guided By Voices oracle Robert Pollard (who also created the album's cover art) may be the last man standing to carry the torch. The merits of that argument are called into question by its very existence as "Robert Pollard" is catchy as hell.

But maybe not as catchy as "Princess Warrior," drummer Jeff Oliphant's highly hummable tribute to cancer recovery. The refrain's plead "help me get back on my knees, I'm begging you, begging you please" is as big a hook as they make 'em. The album covers some wider ground too: Goffrier's "Joke Outfit" has biting guitar and smiting lyrics, and his "Hurricane Bill," "Pitbull Cruiser," and "Happy New Year" are grand, smooth pop. Waleik's "Sarah and Monica" recalls Dipper's longtime (and perhaps over-estimated) association with scientific and extra-terrestrial imagery (c.f. "Lunar Module," among others), but is as much a memory of summers past spent under "constellations in summer skies," though it does ask "is memory matter, in that it can be destroyed?"

Big Dipper Crashes On The Platinum Planet is everything we'd hoped it would be. Full of catchy hooks, idiosyncratic playful guitar jousting, and that essential silliness that make the band what it is. That latter bit may be the most important. Whether it's oddball characters called Lord Scrumptious, or the way Bill Goffrier hesitates while reaching for a high note in your face, or the way his guitar jabs in response to Gary Waleik's, Big Dipper continues to remind us that this whole music thing is supposed to be fun.

The self-recorded album out this week (very limited blue vinyl available here and signed CDs here) is their first since their 1990 major label debut (and finale) and their 1992 breakup. This reunion run started in 2008, when Merge, doing a great public service, reissued the band's Homestead catalog (an EP and two nearly perfect albums), along with a revelatory collection of an album's worth of material recorded but never released after the band's very short major label tenure. That collection, and the band's joyous reunion shows, hinted at what they were still capable of. Now we know for sure.




This is just the latest in a great classic Boston rock renaissance that I've talked a lot about in this space. These last few weeks alone have seen reunions of legends Human Sexual Response (who played literally every song they released in their short 80's run) and 90's indie pop favorites Fuzzy, who played a birthday show for one of their guitarist-singers, along with Tanya Donnelly playing a few Belly hits with Buffalo Tom as her backing band, along with the latter running through a few of their biggies as well.

This isn't just about reunions, though. I always closely associated Big Dipper with their contemporaries The Cavedogs as they trod the same boards around town and were in the same rough neighborhood of 'pop,' but the latter with their own bent and a bigger rock sound and more 12-string jangle. Like Big Dipper, the Cavedogs had their own flirt with the majors that led to their downfall. Their guitarist, Todd Spahr, spent the 90's leading greats Merang and then The Gravy before pulling up stakes and moving to Los Angeles. Save a couple of Cavedogs reunions (like this one a couple of summers ago), we haven't heard from him in awhile.

He finally resurfaces as a member of Banquet Hall, along with a couple of other Boston transplants. Rick Shaw, a criminally under-appreciated songwriter that some called the Godfather of the Northern Worcester County post-punk scene (by 'some' I mean I called him that) when he fronted his early band, Navy Blue Nuns (grab their great compilation here) before leading a couple of quality Boston bands like The Meltaways and Krebstar, handles the other guitar and Paula Kelly, who cut her teeth in cult legends Drop Nineteens and remained a prominent scene figure throughout the late 90's and early aughts, plays the bass and does some arranging as well.

After grinding it out in L.A. clubs for a few years now, the band has just released their debut album, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?, which is the sum of its great parts. Right off the top of it feels so great to hear Spahr's playful jittery guitar chords on leadoff track "Stars After Stars" and Shaw's pop classicist approach to "Puppets," with warm lounge harmonies from the Watson Twins. Later, Spahr's "Urban Renewal" betrays an Elvis Costello influence wrapped in a cozy acoustic guitar, Shaw's "Bells On" is the kind of heart-on-your-sleeve pop song that Boston songwriters (like, say, Buffalo Tom) seem to do so well, and the band resurrects an old Merang single to great effect with lost classic "Drunk and Quartered."

Here, have a listen:


-Michael Piantigini


Big Dipper: Facebook | Twitter 
Banquet Hall: Facebook | Bandcamp

20: Lilys | In The Presence Of Nothing

[UPDATED] Lilys' In The Presence Of Nothing is a hugely important record for us at Clicky Clicky HQ, one that features some of our favorite songs of all time. Foremost among these is the album closer "Claire Hates Me," but we also strongly favor the icy, narcotic stunner "Elizabeth Colour Wheel" and even the epic instrumental vibe-out "The Way Snowflakes Fall." Truth be told we had grander plans of memorializing the album's 20th anniversary, but the big-deal (to us) piece we had hoped to publish hasn't yet been delivered, so que sera sera. As we have another "20" feature slated to roll early next month, we wanted to make at least some remarks about In The Presence Of Nothing, the colossal full-length debut of the constantly shape-shifting Lilys, before 2012 gets away from us altogether.

In The Presence Of Nothing is a stone-cold shoegaze classic, one so good that, paradoxically, its brilliant execution may have earned it as much dismissal -- due to its strong, unmistakable and unapologetic My Bloody Valentine influence -- as acclaim. It was co-released in September 1992 by two storied labels, the still quite prominent Slumberland and the now sadly defunct Spin-Art, and it bore the dual catalog number DRYL 020 / Spin-Art 2. Band mastermind Kurt Heasley -- who, as regular readers know, continues to occasionally release Lilys records even now -- regularly changes the personnel of Lilys, but for In The Presence Of Nothing he was abetted by members of Velocity Girl, The Ropers and Suddenly Tammy!, as Wikipedia helpfully points out here. The record is long, long out of print, but we are hoping that some sane individual or group of individuals will one day rectify that. In the meantime, copies pop up on EBay now and again, and we were dumbfounded to see today that one completely INSANE individual is currently selling copy number 1 of the first edition of 500 In The Presence Of Nothing LPs, which affords us the opportunity to show you what the vinyl art and package (as opposed to the CD art above) looks like. Image 1. Image 2. Image 3. Image 4. [NOTE: as KF points out in the comments, all 500 copies of the original LP pressing were labeled "1 of 500," so we are slightly less dumbfounded by the above, but still...]

Enumerating the many reasons this record is special to us seems to straddle the line between pointless and self-indulgent, so we'll avoid getting too deep in to the underbrush in that regard. But we will say Lilys' full-length debut is among the records that changed our relationship to music forever, by showing us that excellent music wasn't only made by people you'd never meet in places you could never go. Music could be learned, amazing records could be made in places like Lancaster, PA -- as In The Presence Of Nothing was -- and not just in sterile, thousand-dollar-an-hour studios in New York, Los Angeles or London. That a more-than-reasonable fascimile of the sound on Loveless could be created for what has been rumored to be a tiny fraction of the budget of MBV's magnum opus, by dudes that you could go see play in local clubs: that was a mental game-changer for us. It brought it all home. It gave us the gumption to pick up a guitar, to have a much deeper relationship with music than we had previously. So happy belated 20th birthday, In The Presence Of Nothing. And goddammit, nobody outbid us for that number 1 LP, okay? Download two tunes from the album below courtesy of the very cool people at Slumberland Records.

Lilys -- "Tone Bender" -- In The Presence Of Nothing
Lilys -- "Claire Hates Me" -- In The Presence Of Nothing

Midriff Residency Night X: Home for Little Wanders Benefit With Soccer Mom, Eldridge Rodriguez, Ex-Planets, Relations

We're grateful. You're grateful. It's Thanksgiving. Let's keep that feeling (sans the awful stomach pain we have right now) alive for a few days, long enough for you to drag your weary, overstuffed frame to Radio Saturday night for the latest installment of Midriff Records' year-long residency. This particular event is the 10th of its kind, but it is a special kind of special in that it serves both as a memorial of sorts for a friend dear to the Midriff camp who recently died, as well as a benefit for a cause close to that friend's heart, Boston's Home For Little Wanderers. Allow us to crib from The Home's web site for a moment: "The Home for Little Wanderers provides a seamless continuum of vital programs and services for every stage of child and family development. For more than 200 years, we’ve earned a reputation for doing whatever it takes to strengthen vulnerable families and keep children safe in their own communities, even when they don’t have family support. Serving children and youth from birth to 21, The Home makes a positive impact on over 7,000 lives each year through a network of services including behavioral health, therapeutic residential and special education, adoption and foster care. In addition, a number of innovative programs provide specialized assistance to youth transitioning to adulthood from state systems of care."

That's real shit. Important shit. Those things alone should be enough of an inducement to guarantee your patronage Saturday, but on top of it being a benefit for a good cause in honor of a righteous dude, you will also be rocked by Clicky Clicky faves Soccer Mom and Eldridge Rodriguez along with Ex-Planets and The 'Mom's 100m Records labelmates Relations. E.R. will be performing hits from his repertoire of The Beatings, Eldridge Rodriguez and No Love songs accompanied on the piano by Mel Lederman, also of the No Love cohort and formerly of Victory At Sea.

These Midriff residency nights have been, as our friend BRD has been known to say, something other than else. If you missed the Halloween show last month (as admittedly we did), you missed E.R. and friends including The Beatings' Erin Dalbec and Soccer Mom's William Scales doing a cracking set of Pavement covers. Fortunately, some enterprising individual recorded the set, and you can hear the entire thing via the Soundcloud embed below. We're also posting streams of Soccer Mom's recent cataclysmic single "A Canoe Shy" b/w "Brides," which is 31 flavors of awesome and which can be purchased via 100m Records right here. So chew on that along with your leftover turkey for the next 44 hours or so. Then get yourself to Radio Saturday night. Here's the Facebook event page, too, wherein you can pledge your allegiance.

Today's Hotness: Pile, Calories, Sunshine Frisbee Laserbeam

>> We've been meaning to circle back to our recent feature in The Phoenix on Pile, the Boston indie rock quartet whose formidable LP Dripping was released late last month. As the band plays a hotly anticipated tour homecoming show Wednesday night with now-band Metz and Northampton-based leading lights Speedy Ortiz, we figured there's no time like the present. Our conversation with Pile founder and fronter Rick Maguire was both long and interesting. He hand-rolled and smoked cigarettes, we drank some beers, we talked about music, it was delightful. One of the many things we didn't have the space to hammer in our Phoenix piece that we found remarkable was Mr. Maguire's understandable yet surprising lack of familiarity with acts from the late '80s and earlier '90s that Pile sounds like. Sure, he knows Jesus Lizard, Polvo and the like exist. He's even heard some of their records a bit. But Maguire said he wasn't conversant in their music. And then he said (well, we're paraphrasing) what we thought was a particularly smart thing: he said at this point he didn't WANT to know those bands' music well, he wouldn't want to be influenced one way or the other by hearing them at this point. We like that, that independent thinking, that drive to be pure. You can stream Dripping via the Bandcamp embed below; buy it from Exploding In Sound Records right here. It's a great record, dark, drop-tuned, regular outbreaks of mayhem, melody, aggression. The show tomorrow night is going to be awesome. Hit the Facebook event page here for details and to proclaim your faith.



>> Birmingham, England-based indie punk quartet Calories have revealed more about what they are doing these days, and how they are doing it, dispelling some of our questions about the recent revelation of Burning Alms yet adding new questions. So, for starters, Calories announced it will issue sometime around Dec. 1 a new EP titled "DMT," and there is an ace video for the strikingly effervescent tune right here. According to the band, the video had 1,000 views in just five days, which is none too shabby. As you can hear from watching the zany, "Benny Hill"-esque clip, "DMT" has a lighter touch that Calories' heretofore characteristic dense, blunt and forceful attack. Indeed, "DMT" is downright jangly. What else? Well, a Facebook status from the band refers to not one, but two new side projects. There's Burning Alms, which we already wrote about here last month, which is referred to as Thomas Whitfield and John Biggs'. But there is also a new bass-less project being helmed by Calories bassist Pete Dixon called Sunshine Frisbee Laserbeam, who is joined by two chaps Andrew Bullock and Ralph Morton. Sunshine Frisbee Laserbeam has apparently been busy making rock and rock videos as well, as evidenced by this recent video for the very great tune "Halloween." So chew on that, why don't you? No word yet on what formats Calories' "DMT" will be available on or what label will release it, but we'll keep up our vigil and bring word about the EP when we can. In the meantime, how about streaming Calories most recent, and quite excellent, full length Basic Nature via the embed below?