The Minks and Friends Throw a Vibrant Virtual House Party

In spite of how much brighter the future of live music seems now compared to a year ago, the outlook for house shows as we knew them — roomfuls of sweat-soaked strangers and friends packed shoulder to shoulder — remains hazy. I know I’m missing house shows’ communal spirit. Friday night's streaming concert hosted by local rock ’n’ roll combo The Minks reminded me how much I also love seeing the insides of people’s places: the decor, furniture and ephemera that offer tiny insights into the houses’ inhabitants. Most of all, I’m missing standing at eye level and feeling one with the band.

Billed as the first installment of a video series dubbed The Good-Good Show, the pretaped performance served as a stylized simulation of an early-spring house party, minus the guests. West Virginia-born singer-songwriter Sierra Ferrell started things off from the front porch, looking like a walking psych album cover in head-to-toe paisley. Ferrell, whose full-length debut on Rounder Records is due sometime this year, echoed vocal jazz from olden times with her haunting, quivering lilt, fingers dancing across the fretboard of her lightly amplified Gretsch hollow-body. After concluding her micro-set, Ferrell set the guitar down and swung open the door of the house to reveal Aaron Lee Tasjan standing across the room, plugged in and ready to go. 

Tasjan is part of a current class of maturing Nashville pop-rock tunesmiths that also includes Jeremy Ivey and Sadler Vaden, both recently covered in this column. Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!, the 34-year-old's fourth full-length for New West, is his most recent study in songcraft, and it balances a hopeful and compassionate outlook with a keen awareness of the garbage in the world. “Computer of Love,” his opening number on Friday, didn't add anything deep to the tech-dependence discussion, but lines like the spoonerism “eight ladies from the late ’80s” spotlighted Tasjan's easy knack for wordplay. His set also involved whistling and beatboxing. His performance ended with trading out his Jazzmaster for a Flying V-like sky-blue electric 12-string made by Gorsuch — a Columbus, Ohio, company chiefly known for double-neck axes that can split in half at their magnetic connection point — for a full-bore rock-out with chorus and delay pedals cranked.  

The camera then panned hard to the opposite side of the living room, where The Minks stood at attention and launched into a series of scrappy four-chord stompers delivered in quick succession. Director Joshua Shoemaker gave the whole show a vibrant blue-and-orange color palette. The way the lighting, the band’s outfits, the artwork on the wall and the stompboxes at the feet of Minks singer-guitarist Nikki Barber played off each other lent a fever-dream-version-of-a-house-show aesthetic to the stream. 

The foursome culled much of the 35-minute set from their forthcoming follow-up to 2019's Light and Sweet LP. The new album doesn’t yet have a title or a release date, but the songs sounded inspired equally by the blues, the Nuggets compilations and the Patti Smith Group. The Minks have been an East Side staple for the past several years, and neither their familial vibe nor their fiery live show has been compromised by the time off. The format of The Good-Good Show did exactly what a good house show will do. It heightened the anticipation not only for the new release, but also for the chance to one day stand in the same room again with a band firing on all cylinders.