She Who Shall Not Be Named has a big crush on Lucy Dreams and there were other acts on the bill I’d been meaning to see, so we trekked over to the Star Bar a while back for a night of music.
First up, Warning Light. I wish the warning had been a lot stronger. A guy with a keyboard, a computer and maybe an effects machine produced a note or chord that slowly transformed into something else. What do you call this form of sound? Drone? Trance? Dial tone? Monotony? Goddamn boring? Less tuneful than Vangelis, less interesting than the Emergency Broadcast System. I did not like it one bit.
Fortunately, Lucy Dreams were next. SWSNBN rattles off influences for which I have no reference. There is a vast swath of music I simply missed. My Bloody who? Crap, I don’t have enough time and money to keep up with just the local stuff, much less continue finding treasures from the past and stuff I should be aware of from out of town in the current day. To me, it’s light a lightweight Sonic Youth – and I’m not even that familiar with them. But I like Lucy Dreams. Sort of spacey, touching on noise rock now and then, vaguely emo from time to time, all done well. My only complaint is that they’re so young their fans make me wonder if I’ve wandered into some all-ages show in Gainesville or something.
They had set up some kind of projector to make for a trippy light show but the thing wasn’t bright enough to tell what was going on. I try to avoid using a flash at shows, but my camera couldn’t handle the low light. I cranked up the exposure in Photoshop and this is the best of the lot.
Mirror Mode reminded me of a sleepy, meloncholy Men Without Hats. My hand-written notes from the show read, “Godawful & they seem to know it. Lackadasical.”
We lasted through a few of their tunes before abandoning ship. It was a work night, so we didn’t have the patience to wade through them and the changeover to see headline act Mood Rights. So many bands, so little tolerance for crap.
