Friday, January 16, 2009
The Spin The Spin: Mother/Father at The End
Posted by The Spin on Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 12:41 PM
Mother/Father. Photo by Steve Cross.
Check out the slideshow for more photos.
While advertised as one of the coldest nights of the year, last night still offered a lot of stuff to do, and so The End was not our first choice--that would have been our bed underneath a nice electric blanket. Worse, it's not news to anyone that The Spin has a knack for never showing up on time. Call it an intense aversion to showing up too early. Well, our worst fears were realized last night when we showed up for what would eventually be a solid uneventful hour before the first band went on.
Chattanooga's Moonlight Bride finally got things going with a dancy brand of indie rock that gave us a major 2003 college radio flashback. Their singer's high-pitched croon reminded us a lot of our own Jon Burr (How I Became the Bomb) if he were perhaps fronting The Fever or Stellastarr. Competent, melodic and by no means offensive to the ears, Moonlight Bride still couldn't keep our attention long enough to prevent a stroll down to the Gold Rush for a shot of whiskey to warm our innards. When we returned, we were pleased to find the room had filled up pretty nicely to about a third its capacity, providing at least a little more body heat in an otherwise benumbed space.
Since we were already set up to anticipate an evening of '80s throwback, post-punk indie-rock, we were not adequately prepared for the swift boot to the balls we received with Cactus's and their first outburst of disjointed hardcore noise punk. With a pantsless drummer between them, brothers Asher and Sam Rogers were in no short supply of attitude, dealing out squealing, scratching guitars, pile-driving bass, sputtering drums and alternating fits of rage and melody. Like their name would suggest, what we got was a prickly aesthetic with some very pure influences--potentially from the likes of The Pixies and Nation of Ulysses--at its core.
Thursday night's main attraction was the local act Mother/Father, who were celebrating the release of their self-titled three-song EP. Clad all in black, lit from below and looming from inside a ubiquitous cloud of synthetic smoke, Mother/Father definitely achieves a small sense of authenticity with their purist approach to late '70s gothic rock. Plodding drums, high-pitched basslines and scathing, jangling, intertwining guitars served up with copious amounts of reverb back up singer-songwriter James Robert Farmer's silky croon. Often breaking into a Jeff Buckley-style falsetto, JRF actually kind of looks like a young Nick Cave with less forehead. Lyrically, we couldn't quite make out the words, but we assume they're depressing and leave it at that. We paid more attention to the powerfully melodic choruses they were serving up instead. After all, we were already going to be reminded of what a cold world it is as soon as we walked outside.
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