"How do you dance to this song?" Daniel asked. "I'm not sure that I've ever danced to this before."
I grabbed Daniel by the hand, spinning and dipping him to Catherine Wheel's "Black Metallic," which seemed to be the only way to successfully move to a slow, plodding beat and multiple drum rolls.
Violaine is a monthly party dedicated to shoegaze, ethereal and dreampop. It is a dance club where it is actually incredibly difficult to dance to most of the songs. It is, essentially, a goth club where one can wear jeans.
Yes, we saw a lot of looks that seemed to fabulously mismatch goth and indie wardrobes. Girls with black bobbed hair dressed mod dress-and-cardigan combinations with thick-soled black buckle boots. Boys wore suits with teased hair. There were a few new-new wave outfits mixed with spooky eye make-up, Sari-influenced outfits done up in black instead of pink and t-shirts of little-known 4AD artists worn with jeans. The best look, however, was the guy who wore a white button-up shirt with a black mohair jacket, a black-and-white scarf tied in an Edwardian (I think) fashion and Dickies. I say this with the utmost sincerity, Violaine attracts the most interesting crowd I have seen in sometime.
We mostly listened to The Nogoego from outside as Daniel pestered Megan with questions about New Jersey and Bon Jovi.
"Daniel, that's rude!" I scolded. "That's like assuming that every gay man loves Madonna."
"My point, every gay man does love Madonna!" he argued.
Okay, making this point to a guy who refers to Madonna as the Queen probably wasn't smart on my part.
The Nogoego, however, did seem pretty smart. It sounded like a full band but the stage featured only one guitar-playing dude and his laptop.
Timonium played a nice set as well. The band plays on Pehr, which is a label I highly enjoy and recommend, reminds me of the Autumns without the sky-high vocals.
It was also a Slowdive tribute night and Melissa and I managed to acquire Slowdive/Club Violaine t-shirts that are fairly huge on us and might make nifty Slowdive minidresses. Maybe it's time to start busting out the leggings. Do we dare?
The dancing, though, was rough, even for folks like us who used to go to goth clubs multiple times per week (and someone like me whose first resident gig was at a goth club). At points we got the hang of it. The music formerly known as trip-hop (Portishead, Massive Attack) is just our normal dance music slowed down to a snail crawl. Ocean Blue's "Drifting Falling" is roughly the same tempo as the average Britpop song, so that wasn't a problem. However, Lush's "De-Luxe" is by far the most difficult song to ever try and bust a groove alongside. Don't bother trying it. You will look like a jerk. I'm sure we looked like jerks. However, we had a good time.