Frankenstein's PB & J

There's a very real possibility that...we've...
as the Carpenters once odiously cooed...

Only Just Begun

That, or I'm just an easily convinced Pollyanna...

Hindsight can render bluntly refreshed perspective. Local sensations flicker, seemingly incandescent with "buzz" that raises brows at the back of the bar and keeps the word on the street whirling - certain bands keep circulating as the go-to answer for the murmuring hipsters trading drowsy late-afternoon conversation about what shows they'll be checking out this weekend.

--Oh, well, ya know,... So and So's playin tonight at the A-B-&-C Bar...so I was thinkin...

--When do you think they go on?

--Man, they're so awesome. At their last show they...
Well, the heat of the moment can be deliciously/deliriously deceptive... I say this now because I'm reflecting, perhaps a bit mistily, that a considerable amount of local bands that were the humble, rough-hewn soundtrack to my local-music-maturation (or rock-refinement) have broken up, some considerably long ago, some just recently, or if not, just slowed down or fizzled in the past year.

But,
impressive performances of late from bands like K.I.D.S., GLOSSIES, Pupils and, yes, even Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr... (and probably 8 others that I'm forgetting), communicated to me the true benefits of living in a busy/animated arts community - call it the Frankenstein effect, if you want... (or, maybe I want to) - a new creature formed from an amalgam of other parts - re-utilization, reanimation, etc etc etc...

Bands formed from other bands, bands coalescing from the components of recently disbanded-bands.

A local band gets started, gets its buzz, gets its first album out-- turns some heads, plays some memorable shows and...inevitably... gets its own little tag for having this sound and this style and this character...somehow, ludicrously albeit, applying a sonic identity to the players involved in said-band. Oh, that one drummer dude from the goth band?

It's nothing new, it's just the sign that a scene's current generation (let's say it lasts, now, a good 5-ish years?) has reached a metamorphosis. Roots have gone real deep and intertwined...thus that, what blossoms above is that much more dazzling.

The network lines form a thick knotty web, this band knows that band knows the other band and you set up a show through that guy who knows this band who played that joint and also has friends in another band out of town.

It runs itself.

With bands placing their songs up on the internet for free, it suggests that, however mad it may make them seem in a capitalist society, it ostensibly means more to them to merely get their songs heard then to $ell an album. Is it too much a stretch to then suggest that they are just as capricious with locally-bred bands (or should we call them projects? Something more fitting to an experiment).

I've not had enough coffee yet to think through to the conclusion. Plus, I'm not in a band. I can't speak from experience on the bonds and convictions involved...

The rewarding part of being in this community is getting the chance to see so many musicians flex their adaptability to other styles and other players via these new bands -bands where they're mixing in with very distinctive musicians who, in turn, are also flexing their own signatures upon the undulating new aesthetic, who, respectively, are likely known 'round town for whatever identity the 'scene' applied them from whatever other past bands they had...

And, like that paragraph above, it all starts to spill atop itself... That girl from this band, this singer from that band, the artist who was doing this kind of sound is now blending with this bassist and now they're making something that's steadily finding its own weird voice...

And it makes you realize that you are attracted to this new weird voice more so than the initial weird voice that bent your ear a year ago...

Maybe...we should call it the peanut-butter and jelly effect?

Or maybe I'm just in the heat of the moment...

Maybe we haven't only just begun... Maybe the healthy thing is to just keep searching for...new beginnings? If not, then one gets jaded that much faster.

But I'm wrapping this up before I start sounding too ... too...

eh.