There’s blood on the wall, and then there’s Blood on the Wall. Photo from .
Of all the god-awful times to unsuction yourself from the couch — and your steady stream of Percocet haze, and your “Lost” Season 3 DVD — it would be the first day of the month of Satan: February. Icy temperatures. The stomach flu. Disgusted sneers from disgusting people. Layoffs. Overtime. Gypsies.
So it was with great strength that we fought gravity and time, and grasped our way to the Friday night.
A man stood in front of the billboard.
“H. . Is that a band, or just…?” he trailed off. A proclamation? The Larimer Lounge is notorious. Dangerous. Jim Yelenick. “Free Speech Sundays.” Beer-stealing Medusas. FREE BARBEQUE ON WEDNESDAYS. Having blood on its dirty walls is just the logical next step.
But is a band, a band that plays this one song. I needed to hear it live, would have stormed out angrily had they not played it. I spin this song at every DJing/party opportunity I can, because I always imagined the room to suddenly erupt with crime with its beginning notes. I imagine people smashing televisions over each others’ heads, blaring sirens, clouds of crack smoke bursting out of angry, orgiastic tangles of limbs. Unfortunately, I’ve never received so much as a head bob from playing it. I had higher hopes for the live version. Itap a simple song; itap called “Heat from the Day.”
We entered. It was a feeble audience for a Friday night, but drunk enough for a large crowd. My first visit to the girls’ room offered a girl puking in the next stall. The second, a man, with both the stall door and door to the bathroom open, revealing his wavering figure, urinating without apology. It was a kind of drunk thatap exhausted from the week, a Friday night drunk.
gathered energy from his Geek Noise Crunk Universe, and threw it all into that crowd, urging them to shake their “sillies” with the same result as hurling said request at a brick wall. He spent half the show in the audience, sometimes yelling without a mic beneath a constant and unending barrage of noise, electronic loops, completely unheard. But still passionate.
Milton is not defeated by his lack of luxuries that other bands enjoy. Other band members, for example. Itap just an uphill battle, being one man and all, to get a crowd, especially a crowd of corpses, to rage like he wants it. He keeps plugging away, the turtle wins the race, adding loops of his guitar, loops of noise. Itap not graceful, except when he reveals that flickering Cameron Crowe soundtrack-optimism in his guitar lines, those light-at-the-end moments that inevitably get drowned out by some large crushing noise that he also created. Melvin is not defeated. He adorns his probably concave, white chest with flickering gold bling. His gold chains literally have little battery-operated lights in them.
I want Melvin to succeed. I want to kick anyone’s ass who raises an eyebrow at his electro-Native American flute solo and dance. Itap the eccentrics who take over my world. Itap the optimists. Milton has two female admirers by the end, one of which is wearing some pretty fantastic spandex. Try getting that with your run-of-the-mill rock band.
Blood on the Wall steps onstage like red-headed, beflanneled cousins from Nebraska. Are they siblings? (yes.) They proceed to execute a thorough, charming, and professional sound check, bantering with the sound man Colin. Don’t they play punk rock? (Yes. Ish.)
And Brad Shanks does his Frank Black/Jack White thing, and Courtney Shanks does her badass Kim Dealio. She could front any punk band, rock band, ’70s rock band, metal band or Melvin Croissant band with that voice. He commands the crowd. They incite the righteous urge I have to defend bands called “derivative.” So what they can most easily be described by using other bands: the Pixies, the White Stripes, even an angrier ; but itap all rolled up into their own world of haltingly sick ’70s riffs and raging thrown-together messy noise.
Punk gets tired for those older than 15, but itap still fun to play with it a little. At least harness it into breaking a mic or something (which happened later). Punk rockers could school anyone on putting on a show, and these kids make trouble-makin’ music, above all. They had been on a tour of Denver’s finest bar establishments since four p.m. They know a little something about trouble, but they still know when itap time to sound check and when itap time to degenerate into chaos: At the climax of the song. At the climax of the show. Thatap important.
Some of their songs melded together though, and some received confused applause due to their lack of definitive endings. The show began to suffer, a bit. And then my expectations were exceeded in an unexpected way.
They launched into “Heat from the Day,” and the nerds emerged. The geeks. The leftovers from Milton’s set, presumably, united in angst and release. With outstretched arms in too-long sweater sleeves, and with shaking knobby knees, the geeks danced at once, as if they were responding to some Dark Mark. To flaring red guitars, they danced like the Devil was chasing it out of them. Milton was in the corner, air-drumming. Girls in spandex shook their sillies. One of the Premiere Nerds approached the cutest girl in the room, trying to dance with her. She didn’t respond, so he danced right next to her, for a good minute. Finally, she gave in, and she danced with him. Everyone left with the same lives as they’d had before, but were better people. It was the First of February.
To read more arts criticism from Reverb contributor Erin Barnes, visit the esteemed .
