Evan P. Donohue and Friends Shake It Up at The East Room

The flyer for Saturday’s all-locals bill at The East Room promised “a night of synthesizers + garage pop.” Eardrummer and Fetching Pails helped us all ignore the rotten weather and the impending specter of Christmas for a couple of hours with differing flavors of synth-driven rock, while Evan P. Donohue transcended the garage-pop label with a sound and image that are equal parts retro and timeless.

Opening act Eardrummer paired two established local names — Adrienne Franke and Eve Maret — for one of their first live gigs as a duo. Guitar accompaniment by both flavored their electronic patchworks, with Maret also chipping in at times on bass. “Planet Orange” was introduced as “the funky one,” with no mention of its namesake being the galactic source of green milk. (OK, not everyone is conversant with Japanese progressive psychedelia — but if you’re not, Green Milk From the Planet Orange’s newly remastered City Calls Revolution is a great place to start.) “Planet Orange” and the entrancing “Space Freeway” sounded as vibrant live as they do on one of the year’s best debut albums by a local act. 

A member of defunct experimental quintet Nightblonde, Jill Townsend primarily flew solo in 2019 when home-recording Telekinesis for Beginners, her stellar debut as Fetching Pails. She brought “Shearer” and other goth-pop standouts to life after Eardrummer’s set, playing synths while joined by Dillon Smith (aka Faster Is Faster) on guitar and Andrew Core on drums. Townsend’s voice proved to be the most compelling and commanding instrument onstage the entire night — though staggeringly, it might not have been at 100 percent. Per a preset disclaimer, she was just getting over an upper respiratory illness that’s been going around. To paint a clearer picture of Townsend’s influences, she and her bandmates worked up a stunning live cover of “Goodbye Horses,” the enigmatic Q Lazzarus song that’s become synonymous with The Silence of the Lambs, to close the set.

In the main event, Donohue and bandmates Coley Hinson (bass) and Josh Minyard (drums) conjured up psychedelic pop vibes that gelled well with the venue’s miniature light-show capability and its impeccable sound system. A few new songs got a test drive, and the trio stunned with a scorching, true-to-the-original cover of Shocking Blue’s “Send Me a Postcard” — the ’60s garage nugget that’s regularly misidentified as a Jefferson Airplane tune. Yet the highest of highs came when Donohue and friends dug into the 2020 album Page of Wands, specifically “Open the Curtain,” “Borrowed Moment in the Sun,” “High in the Country” and best of all, the power-pop-meets-AM-gold stunner “Hangin’ Up the Party Line.”

For the uninitiated, Donohue co-founded local garage-punk luminaries Diarrhea Planet in 2009. He went on to run live sound for years for Margo Price, and he and his bandmates have played and recorded with Price’s husband Jeremy Ivey as The Extraterrestrials. Dononue’s more than a reminder of the Infinity Cat Recordings heyday — a time when Nashville had no less of a place at the garage-punk table than Memphis or Atlanta. Instead, his music represents the deep creative well that persists in town and springs eternal at spots like The East Room. Overall, familiar faces from the vicinity of East Nashville proved that their music’s as vital as ever before.