Jay Reatard, Terrible Twos, Cola Freaks, 10-15 Magic Stick

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Jay Reatard, Terrible Twos, Cola Freaks, 10-15 Magic Stick

It was raining pretty steadily outside; it was a weekday, and there was the third and final presidential debate, being televised live. (My favorite part is when McCain said ACORN is about to perpetrate one of the greatest voter frauds in U.S. history, destroying the fabric of democracy. Huh? Huh?? Aren't you on the red team? I think your guy beat him to the punch the last two times around). But, a good amount of people still came out to the Magic Stick, if not for the show upstairs, people could dig on the show downstairs, on the makeshift stage out on the bowling lanes in the Garden Bowl, featuring Detroit's the Pop Project and Deastro.

Anyhow...Detroit's favorite hardcore-revivalists/synth-shred-punk rockers the Terrible Twos properly opened up the consistently punk-flavorful night, presenting a few songs their home crowd has been hearing and thrashing to for the last year, off of their latest LP, but also presented a number of newer, more visceral drone-dredging epics that slowed the pace but didn't ease off on vigor or ferocity.

Cola Freaks, who...all I knew leading up to this, were from Denmark, or somewhere, presented a pleasing style of punk that utilized the hooks of power-pop but still kept things a bit loose, freewheeling and at times intense and chaotic. (At one point, the tie-dyed shirt wearing lead singer, eyes bulging, arms constantly flailing as though he'd just burned his hand, grabbed a guy in the front row by the head and brought him in close, shout-singing into his face for two-and-a-half minutes...feeling very hardcore-VFW-hall-ish, in that attack-the-crowd sense... kinda funny, kinda scary).

Then Jay Reatard came out and blitzed through a glorious, ravenous, rousing set of always-set-to-75-mph renditions of songs from Blood Visions and his latest release, the Matador Singles (08). Though the crowd was a little subdued throughout, Jay's dashing thrashes finally got them going, especially during the pounding "Oh It's Such A Shame" and the somewhat-poppy-on-record--though-all-out-punk-in-a-live-setting performance of the Matador Singles "See/Saw."

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