Amazon's product description of their newest release Mass Hypnos (Dig): The psych-garage-noise purveyors jump back in the minivan to play every rock club, basement, & skate park they can, leaving a trail of broken guitars & pizza crusts from Michigan to Mars.
Cute, but this isn't quite fair. Indeed, Awesome Color remains a category-busting young power trio of the most maximum enjoyment possible for rather more reasons. Their 14,457 fans on Myspace, as their own contemporaries, completely fathom whatever references abound that remain completely indecipherable to yours truly. And I don't care.
No, I'll be addressing you, Mr., Mrs. and Ms. Over Forty Rock Fan. You complain and criticize (and say I'm nothing in your eyes. Boomer referential, sorry) that nothing new sounds as good as the favorites of your own youth. Balderdash and crockola. Step outside your demographic for a moment: the air's fine out here.
It's just a question of quantification (they're aren't that many of them) and medium (strangely enough, the exponential growth of the web to promote all that is spankin' new in correlation to the decline of open-minded, free to hear radio stations willing to play something different has resulted in muddy miasma of millions upon millions of new bands online about whom you never will know a thing and will have broken up by next Thursday anyway, so why bother.)
Awesome Color are just the exceptions for you, fellow hard rock geezers. Their three releases on Sonic Youth's boutique label Ecstatic Peace each present a progession from frantic urgency, earliest Stoogean minimalism (you're going to love their 2-note songs,) head in the clouds stream of consciousness, and noise afficianado-ing to excellent musicianship and groove-on-groove sound vibrancy, all within the same cd. And each cd proves more wondrous than the next.
Full sonic descriptions in my earlier AC blog here.
So just buy at least one already and bliss out to something novel for a change. If you don't, Dr. House knows you're idiots. Stimulate those regressing brain cells with good new music. Of course, the band itself is going to hate me for pitching their life's work to their grandparents. And I don't care.
Annotation to my live photography of Awesome Color here, 4.26.10. As with many youngish bands, their gigs mutate throughout any long tour, and I found myself traipsing under onramps and running across freeway offramps in downtown Los Angeles searching for the impromptu club to which their cancelled-that-night venue was transferred. (thank gawd I checked online before I left. I'm not that much of a geezer. Hmm. Strike that. I am insofar as I forgot the exact local dates and missed the easier to find, static club gig of the night before. Sorry, Derek.) In actual fact, I never would have found the "club" (the patio of a government building) at all had I not heard it from afar down the street (which caused it to move all bands indoors after complaints from the slum next door) and into the gallery space therein. Hence the white walls.
Below is one of the patio bands, Garbaj Kaetz, who get a B+ for their efforts thereupon. Their grade might rise if they're still playing past next Thursday.
Stop the presses, unfortunate addenda as of 5.6.10 : on the heels of ending its latest cross-country bread and water tour, the band Awesome Color is no more, although all its recorded legacy remains available for purchase and all its members remain alive, well and open to new creative music endeavors, especially Derek Stanton. I'll never joke about bands playing past next Thursday ever again, I swear!
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