The Black Comets opened last night's show with a surf instrumental, and a damn good one at that. For those first three or four minutes, the band reminded me of The Bomboras, who I think I saw more times than I can count between 1995 and 1997, but without the spookiness, fire and go go dancers. I looked at my brother, who is quite the fan of surf music, and he seemed impress. By the second song, though, the band crushed our expectations of the show by jumping into some very spastic punk. I thought it reminiscent of the Misfits. My brother thought it was more like Bad Religion and proceeded to list a string of songs written "before they sucked." I was never into Bad Religion, though, so I can't really qualify that description.
"It's evident from the first song that the band knows how to play their instruments," my brother said later that evening. "They just choose not to."
That's the thing I don't get about bands. If you are a beginning or generally crappy musician, sloppiness is expected, but why is sloppiness an art form for those who can play? Why was the drummer, who proved himself more than adequate during that first song, all over the place for the bulk of the set?
I don't know The Black Comets, nor had I heard of the band before the show, but it's obvious that this band has some real potential. I just wished that they would do more with the style at which they excel, work the surf guitars into some strong rock songs and incorporate the singer into the numbers, get him to sing in the snotty-but-catchy fashion on the song they described as "the hit" all the time, instead of just punking it up for a half-hour. Punk is boring. Really, it is. In this case, my mind started to wander over to a pair of boots on the feet of some random girl. These were the most incredible boots I have seen in some time-- low-heel Victorian style with a patent heel and tip and what seemed to be a black and white needlepoint print covering the foot and leg. I would have asked her where she got the boots, but after seeing such an unusual pair of shoes at a club, it would be odd to show up at the same club in the same shoes a few weeks later. Then, for reasons that I do not know, I thought about this comic strip called Monica and Anthea that was in the back of Seventeen when I was in high school. The strip was based around a tall, completely ordinary blonde named Monica and her short, goth friend Anthea. Way back in high school, my friend Kim and I would refer to ourselves as Monica and Anthea because, well, she was normal and I was goth. Also, she was six-feet, which kind of made me look short even though I'm not. I wondered what happened to those comics and why is it that whenever I try to find them on Google, my searches return with nothing.