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Before we go over tonight, a quick recap for those in the back (this is every day tit for tat you owe your dealer and can't pay back): The Flesh played a show at KF last week and were a lot better than the previous live shows I caught them at. I'm going to blame Bowery Ballroom for sucking and move on. The opening act (Tra-La-La's) scored a 6.1 on pitchfork, but I think that's because they have lots of girls (4). There was nothing wrong with their music, but it would have been much more enjoyable if any of the (4) girls were playing instruments.

The bassist for the headliners, Detroit garage (dare I say it? I dare) legends Dirtbombs, had a little mishap during the concert: she broke one of the strings on her bass. Bass strings (and the bottom 3 or 4 strings on a guitar, depending on what kind of strings they are) have a solid core string made out of some metal and then a copper coiling to give it girth and thus a lower pitch. Sliding your pick along the ridges that the copper coil forms makes that nifty screaching sound when your distortion is way high up; listen to a punk song and when the power chords stop and it sounds like they're rewinding a tape, that's it. It's possible (it doesn't happen often on a guitar, but it's happened to me a few times) to snap the core without actually snapping the exterior coil, so that the coil unravels itself around the core as you try to remove it. I don't know what this poor girl was trying to do (actually, I know exactly what she was trying to do), but usually I snip these things with a nail clipper since often they are even too tough for my cheap pairs of scissors to work.

So the situation described of course transpired, and the bassist turns around to, by force of strength and hand and finger, sever the coil that is keeping her broken string dangling from her bass. I'm not a bassist, but I used to play a lot of bass when Doug and I would jam, and I only ever broke a string once, so I guess this might not happen too much to bassists during a show. The force I previously described prooved to be insufficient to sever the coil, but what it did sever was quite a bit of meat from her right index finger. When she turned around (with a horrible look of shock, like she saw a ghost) blood was quite literally pouring into a pool that was already coallesced at her feet, less than a meter from me (I was against the stage). After being carried off stage by the other bassist suffering from what appeared to be shock related convulsions, she came back to play the next few songs with some gauze wrapped around her finger. This gauze quickly, quickly became a wet vermillion mess. At first concerned that she'd slip on the crimson slick she had created at her feet, I was next concerned that she was unable to perform simple motor tasks without shaking violently. I really dug the Dirtbombs, but after this up close show of tenacious but disturbing showmanship, I had to call it a night.

Tonight was a nice, relaxing, bloodless night to enjoy a group of bands at Sin-e that all fit together in this 70's revival trash rock thing. My favorite of the evening, and the one that attracted me to the show, was Dirty Rainbow; you can check out some of their sample tracks. They are playing again on the 27th of August in the year of the lord 2005, this time with Stylofone who I caught at a Shy Child concert like 7 month sago. Dirty Rainbow has much more of a bluesy swagger to their rock, where as Stylofone ( their space ) are kind of straight forward metal. I did like their song "Magistrate" live though.

As for Rainbow's performance, it started out a little messy but ended pretty well. I was very surprised to see that their drummer was female; I don't know why, but the whole feel they had going on just didn't scream out "_female on the skins_." They kept a good song for last, but by far their best was "Hey" and some other song which also had "Hey" in the chorus, but wasn't "Hey". If you take a listen on their site or at theirspace, you'll see why it'd be great live. Unfortunately, and this is a huge unfortunately, the strong Jim Morrison vibe I was getting off of their recorded stuff was nowhere to be heard live, and its lack was definitely missed. This whole NYC "Heavy on the reverb vocals" thing has got to go. You don't need god's pipes to sing, but if you have a voice lying around please do not substitute reverbed yelling in its stead.

I finally got my grubby paws on Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's debut, and of course the band that I wanted to but didn't check out for the past 9 or 10 months turned out to be quite incredible. Pitchfork gives them a 9.0 or something; I'd say 8.0 of that is a rating on quality and 1.0 is them fulfilling their function of relaying the band's popularity among indie's elite to the unwashed ignorant masses. In any case, I'm going to try to catch them before they end up playing in Madison Square Garden or something.

The track that I found to be irresistable, the same one that Pitchfork singled out (I'm getting good at this), is "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth", which boops and bops along at a delightful pace and is almost impossible to remove from your head. People won't like the guy's voice, or they'll nitpick some other stuff that they think is important and then ignore just how refreshing this album is. By people, I mean people who are atuned enough to actually find and listen to it but not engaged enough to care about disliking it and the damage to your 'hip vibe' that might cause. Because CYHSY are hip as shit.

But if you can get past the playful cracking in the lead, you'll quickly find yourself in love with the odd mixture of sound and voice which all at once floors you with intense emotion and lulls you to your mind's back porch with a cold wet glass of lemonade, a mixture that fits perfectly and clashes violently at the same time. The best way I can describe it is to mix the aesthetic and emotion of Neutral Milk Hotel with the oddball-ity of Modest Mouse, but that's because I'm not very good at describing things.

When/If Dirty Rainbow records an album, I'll drop some thoughts about it.