set and setting/Jensen Serf Company/Pipe Dreamer

Friday, October 12th 2018

Paper Crane, St. Petersburg FL

Silver Alert/McFeely’s/Imminent Riot/Laser Mouth

Friday, October 12th 2018

Fubar, St. Petersburg FL

Set and setting, having won the Creative Loafing Best Export award this summer, are now on their way back from their European tour.  So why not release a review of their local kick off show from three weeks ago at Paper Crane?  Sorry to all those involved, but I’ve been busy trying to batter the balloon-industrial complex into a thousand glittering pieces that were originally assembled with Minnesota prison labour.  Judging by my lack of a firing, or the absence of a phone call from the company CEO laughing in my ear as he inhales helium while masturbating, it’s off to a slow start.

Speaking of class warrior dreams, the first act on this night are Tampa Bay metalheads Pipe Dreamer.  While the consensus is still lacking on whether heaven is a halfpipe, for these three there is no doubt that heavy is a full pipe.  This is certainly not a dreampop project. Atmospheric Isis stylings of monster volume are veered away from only with a cool cover of Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) (Metal) by Neil Young, the chorus of which features some massive pipe bellowing from the Pipe Dreamer drummer, made all the more powerful for his lack of microphone.

Next is another band with a name that makes me think simultaneously of being an ageing punk kid pretending to understand extreme sports and being a jaded fighter for the plebeians, Jensen Serf Company.  This scuzzy experimental garage act is one that has eluded me for many years despite various attempts, and they sound pretty class here.  Ben’s vocals have an aloof quality to them, as if he’s gazing off to the side of your eyeline somewhere over the top of a slalom instrumental.  A performed cut with the line “I was walking with a friend of mine” sounds very familiar, to the point where I later scout out and scour the split tape that JSC put out with New Pleasure on Sturdy Girls Records in 2012 (yes, it’s taken me that long to see them).  No avail though, and all that Google can tell me is that Steven “Lips” Tyler used the same words in some leathery skinned sex song.  The baby step of finally catching Jensen Serf Company is enough for now though, with a short performance that provides the same sort of compact satisfaction as a cassette.

The nu-hippiedom vibes here at Paper Crane finally come to a head with guests of honour (mind)set and setting.  Off the back of their wonderful album Reflectionless last year the mesmerising post-metallers today release their 4th record Tabula Rasa, followed by the aforementioned tour in Europe -- a place I’d like to go in the next few months before continentals use the vast amount of free time provided to them by the bloc to build a giant seawall in the Channel.  I happen to be thinking about this depressing scenario when Bad and Boujee by Migos fades out, just in time for me to hear two members of set and setting practicing their English accents by telling each other to “fuck off mate.”  Well, I intend to after you’ve played a few bars at least. If that’s how you speak to each other in preparation for a gig it’s no wonder that Mark Etherington did that very thing and reduced you to one of those weird bands with only one drummer.  Regardless, the drums here are still pounding, the bass insane, the guitars twiddling.  There’s all that you could need as far as psychedelic headbanging, enveloping wormholes and intimidating slowdowns.  Set and setting may not use words, but I do. A review without words would be a tabula rasa (blank slate) of its own, and a huge waste of none of your time.

* * *

The reduction in drummers continues, with the machine-powered duo Laser Mouth opening festivities over at my late summer hangout Fubar.  But on this occasion I would sadly not catch them. With all my recent event hopping, I might be making a play for the fabled title of “the internet’s busiest music nerd,” but I still can’t be in two places at once, at least until laser science improves a metric shit tonne.  If you’ve been reading my stuff on the regular (as I fully expect you to have been) you’ll know what to predict from other recent performances.  Lasers, mouths, bands terrified at the concept of playing after them, that sort of thing.

St. Pete punks Imminent Riot are not too proud to admit their imminent intimidation of Laser Mouth.  Let’s hope that’s all that makes them nervous. Between these guys and indie poppers 4 Star Riot playing over at Dunedin Brewery right about now, this could be the night that we finally overthrow our masters and burn this mother down.  Everything we need seems to be present. Guitarist and singer Brad Wolf is wearing a Black Panther tee as the band performs I Can’t Breathe (“stop killing us!”).  There’s a cover of a Billy Bragg song, To Have and to Have Not (although I imagine the Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards interpretation is more of a reference point for these dudes).  Other “totally original” tunes come in the form of More Beer by Fear and Where Is My Mind?, to which the answer, clearly, is on the farthest outskirts of possibility.  Be realistic -- demand the impossible!

I met McFeely’s bassist/singer Leah Kenady earlier this year at an absolutely amazing house show in Clearwater (punk marriage proposals, cop shakedowns, top music).  She gave me a copy of the band’s Expedite record, and as their full former moniker states, they have a speedy delivery indeed.  The all-singing trio also deliver poppy skate rock, and humour seems important to them, with their collective shirts sending a message involving the Knights of Ni, nuns and nipples, which sounds like a story arc from a lost Father Ted episode.  Speaking of humorous intoxication, I have a load of notepad scribbles here that I cannot for the life of me understand, indicating that the alcohol was by this time coursing and that you should always type up your brainfarts ASAP.  They include “Soccer? Colombia?,” something about a man in a Manchester United shirt slinking away, HHRT, IT/USB, what looks like “fatway” and zombie spider (which I do recall was about the Halloween costume of Leah and drummer Justin’s daughter, certainly not something made by the milquetoast wankers at Party City).  It shouldn’t be surprising that their daughter wanted to creatively cross concepts, as McFeely’s have planned their recent narrative album The Neighborhood to coincide with a post-apocalyptic comic book, the first chapter of which is available to view here and taps into that ever so relatable feeling that the whole world is going to fuck in a handbasket.

So things don’t bode well for my coverage of Silver Alert, but let’s give it a go.  I know for a fact that I was planning to head home (due to having work at eight and it now being something like one), but it appears that I used the framing of my anti-capitalist worldview to say FUCK IT!  I can sell people their ethnically insensitive costumes whilst feeling like dogger, and for that I get to enjoy the 100 mph stylings of these local old souls.  I mysteriously pick out the detail of a NOFX beer coozy somewhere on stage, a band Silver Alert resemble when they have the audacity to slow it down a little bit.  Tracks like The Cat Song (“I don’t wanna go to work… MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW”) and I’m Tired (“All I wanna do / Is fall asleep by two”) are lightning fast cries for elusive sleep in the face of employment, that take on an artistic importance that just didn’t occur to me when I saw the silver oldies at the luxuriously early time of 10pm back in March.  It’s like listening to a Jeff Rosenstock record (the new Antarctigo Vespucci being another piece that I’m catching up with).  Trying to stave off tomorrow morning is like trying to stave off ageing, and as I write this in a woke stupor (in efforts to get aligned for a series of post-Halloween overnights) I am much more conscious of the fact that sleep is not up for negotiation and we are all getting less of it than ever.  Trying to force some actual personal life out of the work straight jacket gives a temporary reprieve at least, even if it is at the expense of our health.

I would repeat a more extreme version of these events two weeks later at a Halloween party, where I would meet a chap with a Mega Man gun arm and a large cardboard robot head.  He told me he made the head to attend the gigs of Nerds Raging, a local band that shares members with Silver Alert.  After trying to talk to him about the scene over the course of several hours that probably ended with me each time getting distracted by a passing drink, I went home, and spewed violent chunks into a fake helmet, provided to me for the night courtesy of Party City.