In 2015, I wrote for the Boston Hassle (and even helped book a couple of shows), was Cool Beans for Halloween, and went to a lot of shows. Here were six of my favorites.
Krill: 10/15/15 (late show), Great Scott
The truth is that I could write a whole feature-length article on Krill’s last show, but that would make this list awfully lop-sided. So I’ll keep this as brief as I can.
It takes a lot of courage to write honest, introspective songs, and it takes a lot of talent to make those songs sound thought-provoking and compelling rather than self-absorbed and dull. But Krill made it all work, somehow. They turned feelings of loneliness and rejection into something meaningful and beautiful. And in our collective love for Krill, we realized that perhaps our own feelings of anxiety and isolation were more shared than we had thought.
tl;dr: Krill reminded us that we’re not alone in feeling like complete shit sometimes, and they did this by recording underground hits like “Turd”.
I went to Krill’s last Boston show alone and sipped on a whiskey sour in front of the soundboard, feeling at once like a member of the crowd and a casual observer of the end of an era. “Jonah [pronounced inexplicably as YO-nah] is the head of the NSA, motherfucker!” exclaimed an excited Krill fan, to the whole crowd and band’s amusement. The band blasted through an emotional set of favorites from all of its albums, from “Self Hate Will Be The Death of Youth Culture” to “Infinite Power” and “Tiger”. And we all sang along, our eyes joyously but wistfully fixated on a band that would soon cease to be.
Boston is a city that breeds impassioned, sometimes bordering on maniacal, fandom—just go to a game at Fenway Park to see it for yourself. But I’d never experienced that kind of fervor for a Boston-grown band until Krill’s final show. It was a special night. Krill, Krill, Krill forever.
Royal Wedding: 9/26/15, Out of the Blue Too
Post-punk and all its calculated cool had a strong resurgence 10-15 years ago. Or maybe that’s just my skewed memory talking, since at that time I was young, naïve, and unwilling to acknowledge the legitimacy of any noise more than a few degrees removed from the Joy Division family of sounds.
One listen to Royal Wedding’s Dry Lagoons brought all those good feelings of post-punk and new wave right back to me again. “Their skeletal, razor-sharp take on a genre that already can be sufficiently creepy when it wants to be– new wave– is an eerie, but welcome, contrast to a Boston scene that’s saturated with friendly, fuzzy noise and wandering experimentation,” I wrote in a March 2015 review of the album, available on Bandcamp.
The band absolutely killed it at Wicked Mess (at Out of the Blue Too Gallery) on September 26, delivering a tight, cutting set. Really, though the most fun part for me was watching the expressions of the audience as lots of folks were impressed by them for the first time, and talking to friends afterward about how much they liked the set. Gratification! Though Royal Wedding is on a hiatus at the moment, guitarist and singer Eric Boomhower has begun gigging with new project Dyr Faser.
Fungi Girls: 6/25/15, SBC
The great thing about underrated bands is that sometimes they play in basements, where it’s easier to get in the front row at shows and shake your ass off for the entire set. This was the case for Texas’ garage-surf-punk-prodigies Fungi Girls‘ show, who played their first-ever Boston gig at SBC this June. I’ve been a fan of Fungi Girls for years, but as I stood in front of their bass player and drummer and watched them rip without breaking a sweat, I was in complete awe. Thanks, Fungi Girls, for bringing the summer to Boston this year—we really needed it.
Ono: 11/7/15 (Hasslefest 7), Brighton Music Hall
This year’s Hasslefest felt more like a gathering of kindred spirits—appreciators and creators of all music that sounds weird—rather than a festival. From Dreamcrusher victoriously high-fiving Unicorn Hard-On after the latter’s set, to Flipper complimenting the fest’s lineup right after taking the stage, Hasslefest 7 was a celebration of the strange, the loud, the unconventional, and the bizarre. And no band quite epitomized that as well as Chicago’s Ono.
Few musical groups defy genre as deftly as Ono does. Perhaps it’s easier to describe what they’re not: they are not a pop band, and they are not boring. Ono’s Travis, who somehow manages to sing and be the band’s hype man simultaneously, emerged wearing white pantyhose on his head, the legs stuffed in such a way that he looked like a tall, lop-eared rabbit. “Have you ever touched a man’s penis, for old time’s sake?” he exclaimed wildly, and repeatedly, to an engrossed crowd, as his amused but nonplussed bandmates jammed behind him. We couldn’t take our eyes off the stage, but for them, it was just another day being a part of the legend that is Ono.
Feral Jenny: 9/19/15, Grandma’s House
Real talk: Feral Jenny is one of my actual real-life friends, making any review I might do of her band (very) biased. Friend or not, though, it’s been pretty cool to watch Jenny’s evolution from one-woman show at her Boston debut at the Whitehaus a couple of years back to full-on garage-pop frontwoman. Her songs are upbeat and deadly catchy—check out the Greatest Hits EP at your own risk— and live, I can only speak for myself in saying they make me long for simpler days when finishing homework and deciding what I wanted for dinner were the most complex decisions I had to make.
Deerhunter: 12/10/15, Royale
Try to name some notable “indie” bands born in the mid-to-late aughts that still maintain artistic and popular relevance today. It’s harder to do than you might think. But Deerhunter has bucked the trend, largely because it’s never felt like they cared too much for trends in the first place. They’re pop, they’re shoegaze, they’re drone, they’re electropop—they’re whatever they’re in the mood to be, whenever they want.
Seeing Deerhunter live is essential to understanding the dynamic of the band and the pathos of their music. Bradford Cox is both the storyteller and his muse, a strangely objective narrator of his own unusually traumatic past. But the band works because it’s a band, and even if Bradford Cox is the main ingredient, his bandmates are the special sauce, who accentuate each of his musical whims to produce incredible music and one hell of a show. This was especially apparent at this particular show, where Cox opened with his experimental solo project, Atlas Sound. It was a good set, but it couldn’t hold a candle to the visual and sonic spectacle that is Deerhunter.
This is my second time seeing Deerhunter in Boston, and like the first show, I loved it because I felt surrounded by friends, who, like me, sang along with nearly every song, no matter how obscure (cheers to ending with “Flourescent Grey”!) or how far back in the band’s catalog it was. A drunk stranger tapped my back and asked “Do you think they’ll play ‘Helicopter’ next?”. I’ve got to admit– I was a little taken aback. I knew they’d play “Helicopter”, but it’s not often that I’m in a room full of people who can name individual Deerhunter songs.
