Dirty and Laundry TV Summer Fest 2015 at The Satellite
(Disclaimer: this came entirely too late, sorry!)
Dirty Laundry Tv Summer Fest 2 was an impressively cool all day music festival at The Satellite that lacked all the less enjoyable aspects that go along with these sort of things. I unfortunately arrived later in the day due to family events for fathers day and missed a few of the bands that I really wanted to see. Death Hymn Number 9 being the main one, but there really wasn’t one band on the bill that I wouldn’t have liked to watch. That being said, what better day to have a show, giving people a great excuse to leave forced family socializing.
I discovered Dirty Laundry Tv about two and a half or three years back while watching band interviews, and have been a fan since then. From what I’ve gathered, they are an awesome group of people that genuinely love music, and are in the “business” for all the right reasons.
The Frights
The first band that I got to catch was The Frights, which ended up being a good energy booster to start the show off. The drummer caught my eye rather quickly, and vaguely reminded me of Brian Chase of Yeah Yeah Yeahs , who I am a big fan of. He added perfectly placed fills and rolled through the fast tempo set effortlessly. I wasn’t familiar with the band before the show, and enjoyed their combination of surf rock and indie punk. I remembuer thinking that the first or second song reminded me of Dick Dale crossed with The Oh Sees. The band had great energy, which the crowd was feeding off of. They even had some 50’s style trash can singer Doo-wop mixed in at times, which surprisingly wasn’t corny. Being Father’s Day and all, the singer dedicated the last (or second to last) song to all the dads.
Blues Williams and Gabe Niles
The following act was Gateway Drugs, who recently returned from tours with Swervedriver and The Jesus and Mary Chain. I’ve known Noa for over ten years through mutual close friends, so I was looking forward to their set. I had seen the band two years ago with Retox and The Icarus Line for the Slave Vows album release show, and immediately noticed that they had dirtied up their sound and approach quite a bit since then. This was for the better in my opinion. It had more of a Jesus and Mary Chain/Loop/BRMC feel. The overall volume was noticeably louder than the other bands, which fit the music well but resulted in somewhat muddied vocals and dissonance at times. Gabe’s visceral performance behind the drums had me pretty enthralled for most the set. He was hitting so hard on Faith Healer that it looked like a drum head was bound to crack at any moment. His voice on the chorus of their single, Head, was more strained and aggressive than before, and the song got cranked and tweaked since the last time I heard it. It was noticeably more powerful than the older rendition. Vocal duties got split up between the three siblings, Noa, Liv, and Gabe. Their time on stage ended with a cacophony of feedback and noise.
Ballerina Watt and The Secondmen
Up next was Mike Watt and The Second Men. I’m not too familiar with this outlet of his and I wouldn’t necessarily go home and listen to an album of theirs, but I really enjoyed the set. It was an interesting combination of punk and jazz, with a hint of no wave. The songs had great dynamics, a very upbeat feel, and had the crowd dancing which is always a plus (unless it’s the sloppy, obnoxious token drunk guy/girl). Watt did a perfectly timed ballerina spin at the end of one song, which I found amusing. They are obviously a very musically fluent band, with the members being seasoned veterans, and it showed. Mike Watt refrained from singing for the most part, and guitarist Tom Watson took the lead while cleverly weaving in and out of songs on his Jazzmaster.
Rob Zabrecky with Members of Possum Dixon and Fred Sablan
After Watt was Rob Zabrecky with members of Possum Dixon. He put on a hell of a show, at times running in place with Ian Curtis Elbows, and at others hammering away on the keys adding an extra pair of hands to the already occupied instrument. Not to mention he made a condom disappear, after joyfully asking the crowd if anyone could spare one. By this time most the crowd were at least tipsy, if not good and drunk, and Zabrecky’s child like exhuberance spread like wildfire. As stated above, towards the end of the set he joined in on keys. This created a wonderful racket. All four hands pounded the notes as if a whac-a-mole competition was taking place simultaneously beside the band.
Audacity played after Zabrecky, and raised the volume back up about 5 notches(battery died, no pics). They were also heavier than I had remembered, and their sound seemed to stretch out over the various era’s and sub genres of punk, while vaguely touching on early “metal” progressions. Their attention to melody and detail caught my ear, which counter acted the in your face approach quite nicely. Only bad thing I can say is that the power metal stances got old in my opinion, but whatever floats your boat. I was tired at this point, and probably didn’t give them the attention they deserved to be honest.
At this point I realized that whoever made the set list for this show did a damn good job; the bands seemed to make up a dynamic mixtape of sorts both individually and as a whole. I definitely prefer it that way, opposed to having two to three similar style bands follow each other, and so on. There was a wide variety of “genres” displayed throughout the time that I was there, and the audience seemed to really welcome the diversity.
The final act of the festival was Colleen Green, who played her set solo. By this point a lot of the crowd had left, as it was a Sunday and I’m sure most the crowd had been there for the better part of the day. Her dreamy fuzz pop closed the night out perfectly, though I would have liked to see her with a band, or even a drummer. Percussion was provided by a drum machine, which to me didn’t do some of the more aggressive songs the justice they deserved. Having that said, it added a relaxed lo-fi feel to the other numbers. Her set had an overall 90’s feel to it, and the audience looked like they were eager students closely paying attention to the lesson at hand. The taco truck that’s a regular outside The Satellite was a definite hit, and had REAL Coke (the drink assholes) in glass bottles if you’re into that sort of thing.
Six thumbs up to Dirty Laundry TV, make sure and keep yourself up to date with their events, interviews, shows etc etc. Good stuff on the horizon..
www.dirtylaundry.tv
Pics taken with a shitty old IPhone, bad form