Skip to main content

Mare Vitalis

Despite all the rain last night, I made the trek up to Denton to see the Appleseed Cast at Rubber Gloves. This was my third time to see these guys and the first time to see them with their new-ish drummer, Nathan "Jr." Richardson.

As I've described their live show before, I feel like I'm watching waves crash on a beach. There's constant movement, but it's slow; there's a lot of beauty, but it's not all pretty; and it's rather peaceful. Last night was no different, and I think it was the best performance I've seen by them.

Promoting their latest, sixth proper full-length, Peregrine, the Cast dug out a few nuggets from their past too. Tracks from Mare Vitalis and Low Level Owl were the highlights for me, but I really enjoyed the new material too. I was very curious to hear Jr.'s parts on the older material because he replaced an incredibly unique player by the name of Josh "Cobra" Baruth.

Cobra had a style that could be best described as "lead" playing compared to standard, straightforward playing. Instead of playing with simple grooves, Cobra's playing was always a walking, behind-the-beat kind of rhythm. Well, Jr. faithfully duplicated the old parts, but he also gave them some extra flair. He left no dead space and played so well. I couldn't stop watching this.

Opening for the Cast was the one-and-only [daryl] and a relatively new band, Broadcast Sea. [daryl] was its usual good, but I had a hard time hearing everything. Broadcast Sea reminded me of Thursday and At the Drive-In, but they weren't tacky knock-offs.

Despite raining off and on last night, Rubber Gloves was packed (not to maximum capacity, but pretty full). Everybody was into the music and hanging out, leading me to think that this kind of community in post-hardcore is still very alive and well.

Comments

Kev said…
Heh, the drummer from my combo was up there seeing that same show last Friday; he called me while I was in New Orleans to ask for directions around Denton.

Popular posts from this blog

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Catherine Wheel

Originally posted: Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 Despite managing to release five proper albums, Catherine Wheel was one of those bands that always seemed to slip past the mainstream rock crowd. Yes, they got some nice airplay in their day, but people seem to have forgotten about them. You may hear “Black Metallic” or “Waydown” on a “classic alternative” show on Sirius or XM or maybe even on terrestrial radio, but that’s about it. For me, they were one of most consistent rock bands of the ’90s, meandering through shoegazer, hard rock, space rock and pop rock, all while eluding mainstream pigeonholing. Led by the smooth, warm pipes of vocalist/guitarist Rob Dickinson (cousin of Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson), Catherine Wheel featured Brian Futter on lead guitar, Dave Hawes on bass and Neil Sims on drums. They weren’t a pretty-boy guitar band, but they weren’t a scuzzy bunch of ragamuffins either. Though the band hailed from England, Catherine Wheel found itself more welcome on American air

Hello, Control

I'm still a big fan of iTunes . I haven't tried Napster , Urge or eMusic as I've been perfectly happy with Apple's program ever since I downloaded it two years ago. However, an annoying new feature has come up with its latest version, 7.0. Whenever you pull up your music library, a sidebar taking up 3/4ths of the screen appears plugging the iTunes Music Store. Why is this an annoyance? Well, first and foremost, since you can't close the sidebar, you can't escape it. I believe a music library is a private collection, a spot away from the music store. So what's the need for constant advertisements and plugs? To provide a better visual, let me describe what I see whenever I pull up a song in my iTunes library. When I listen to "This is a Fire Door Never Leave Open" by the Weakerthans, I see a graphic for Left and Leaving , the album that it comes from (and available in the iTunes Music Store), along with a list of the Weakerthans' other albums,

Politics Shmolitics

Yesterday, the more pleas I saw for people to go out and vote, the more uncomfortable I felt. Plenty of the blogs I hit up everyday said something along the lines of "Vote and if you don't, don't complain." Folks, this is why I find discussing politics so alienating. There are plenty of reasons why I don't discuss politics on here or in my everyday conversations. The biggest reason is because I don't have a lot of interest in politics in the first place. By what I've seen, heard and read for the last eight years, political debates are usually pissing contests. Judging by the views I've processed, it would be easy to think that we're all slowly going downhill either on the left, right or down the middle. Yet I don't think we're going totally downhill or totally uphill. Debating the direction we're going seems futile, especially when adults start screaming at each other like they're in grade school. To my ears, political debates are s