Three Shows You Won’t Wanna Miss This Week

Tournament, Big Huge, Barbed Wire, Dealer
Saturday April 15, 8 pm at The Glove: $10 

Grow a pair (or a pear?) and show your face at this pair of shows featuring some unfamiliar faces and others you know well. But don’t expect some double-mint/doppelgänger situation either, as these shows are mirror images of one another in a variety of ways.

For one, Dealer–the opening band on Saturday’s show at The Glove, just so happens to be headlining a Sunday-night show at the Silent Barn. Tricky, I know! But all you gotta keep in mind is that, while Dealer may have started out at the very bottom of the Oakland band pile, as an “art statement rather than a categorical band” selling “grungy weirdo dissonant punk,” the boys have changed their tune. Though, you’d have a hard time calling Billionaire Boys Club (Dealer’s latest album, which Wicked World Records dropped in February) a stab at the more refined. As if. Instead, the boys have taken up residence at Thrash Palace where their experiments in the depraved have resulted in a shockingly excellent combination of thrash metal’s glam and gore, under the guise of so-called “experimental rock” tendencies. Let’s just get right to the point and call it “party.”

To mine ears, this is what Midwest punk has done to, well, punk by adjusting the all-too-serious genre to local values such as self-depreciation and the crippling fear of coming across as anything other than polite/pleasant/reasonable. Dealer also manage to balance having a sense of humor about themselves with an earnest love and respect for their progenitors. (The boys are pictured on their album cover passionately fellating soft-serve cones while dressed in pressed khakis and tennis whites– I mean, have you ever seen a thrash metal band such as this?) Or, who knows? Maybe they’re just trying to dismantle stiff systems as we know them–that Billionaire Boys photo could totally be interpreted as inciting class warfare.

And, ok, ok, I hate to say it but two bands makes a trend– Tournament is Brooklyn’s answer to this ’80s cheese-metal revival, complete with teenage-riot sing-a-longs, gnarly guitar solos, and lick-it-quick vocals that are easily imitated by smoking a pack of Marlboro Reds and making frustrated-man grunts.

DIY regs Big Huge will be on hand too, along with Barbed Wire. a band that could be the Nascar-drivin’ lovechild of Thin Lizzy and Captain Beefheart.

Dealer, Chud, Worse, Suspect
Sunday April 16, 8 pm at The Silent Barn: $8

Dealer will return to their punk roots with the punkier of their two nights in town. Chud, a locally-harvested hardcore band whose first EP was titled Out of the Sewers, will certainly be a boost in that direction.

And in case you haven’t noticed from the lil banner up top there, all four bands are legit the hardest thing to search on Google, which seems like a movement of great import for these NSA times. More power to bands like Worse and Suspect for their elusiveness.

Anti-World Tour 2017
Thursday April 13, 8 pm at Babycastles

I trust that you’ve heard about the court case where one itty-bitty little Oxford comma (rather, the absence of one) determined the fate of something like $10 million. If you’re an Oxford fan who rejoiced in the comma’s historic victory like myself, then my guess is that you can really get behind this show happening Thursday at Babycastles. Please, take a moment to revel in the beauty of the Anti-World Tour 2017, which is decidedly not Rihanna’s Anti world tour.

Anyways, you probably wanna hear about the actual music happening at this show, or whatever. But words can only capture so much of what the nine (!) artists gracing this bill are up to– “experimental hip-hop” as Syringe calls it; my unfortunately lame descriptor of Ghostie‘s self-reflective, surprisingly emotive trap; and of course, how do I even start to pick apart Ego Mackey‘s lengthy, actual sobs-as-songs? For now anyway, all I can say is don’t miss the chance to see so much hip-hop nowness packed into one tiny space.

Also up for performances are CXRPSE, Julien, Sleeping for Years, Jimmy V, Aloe Yoroi, and Jay Vee.