photos by Andrew St. Clair

John McCauley of Deer Tick made it clear at last night's free BV-presented Brooklyn show that they weren't there to protest with the protesters of Occupy Wall Street. Nothing against Occupy Wall Street, but the band more importantly wanted to to help bring attention to the police brutality that is happening to the protesters at Wall St., because everyone has a right to protest.

Everyone also has the right to rock! And Deer Tick rocked for two hours at Willliamsburg venue Death By Audio, a DIY space that the now-Webster Hall-headlining band last played about three years ago. The all ages capacity crowd started lining up at 8pm, the place filled quickly, and the band (no opener) was on around 9. Without the pressure of playing to a paying audience, Deer Tick had fun and played their hearts out. They debuted many new songs live, played a bunch of covers, and lots of classics too. The sound was excellent and loud.

John McCauley has never been afraid of sharing the mic with guest singers, but the past couple of years have also seen Deer Tick increasingly showcasing the singing abilities of other permanent members of the band as well. Most notably, guitarist Ian O'Neil takes center stage at times, but drummer Dennis Ryan also gets to showcase his voice, like he did on one crowd favorite they tested out for the first time last night, that will appear on the band's new album Divine Providence (out 10/25).

Covers included the Replacements, Foreigner, Nirvana (Deervana), The Shivers, Chuck Berry and Michael Hurley (who happens to play Union Pool tonight).

One of the live sort-of-debuts wasn't a Deer Tick song, but one that will appear on an album by yet another supergroup side project. The crowd thought for sure John was talking about Middle Brother when he started to intro the song, but it quickly became apparent that in fact there is now a supergroup #2. Diamond Rugs is its name (Damn I Am On Drugs), and its members include Ian from Black Lips (who also have a Webster Hall show coming up), Hardy from Dead Confederate, Bryan Dufresne from Six Finger Satellite (who was at the show), Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, and John & Robbie from Deer Tick. The Diamond Rugs song they played is a Christmas song, which I called a "sort-of-debut" because it has been played in front of people at least once before (video from the Hamptons below). Stay tuned for more about Diamond Rugs.

To the delight of many who were shouting out requests, Deer Tick played a hard-hitting full band version of "Christ Jesus" and closed the set with the fast and fun Ramones-esque "Let's All Go To the Bar", complete with John McCauley stage dive.

More tour dates HERE. A recent Deer Tick Landromatinee session was put online HERE. More pictures from the Brooklyn show, below...

Continue reading "Deer Tick played a free show @ Death by Audio (pics), played a Christmas song from new project Diamond Rugs"

by Black Bubblegum

The reunited Six Finger Satellite are coming back in NYC, having scheduled August 15th at Southpaw, their only date at the moment. Tickets are on sale.

6FS reunited in 2007 and released Half Control, a record originally planned prior to their break-up, the next year on Load Records. Their "newest material is still being worked on" and the band is "searching for a label to help unleash the anschluss". Until that materializes, heres some background interesting facts on the band which at one time included John Maclean (AKA The Juan Maclean) as well as a soundman named James Murphy:

Maclean and Murphy met while each were building his own recording studio around 1990. They bonded over a shared love of dance music at a time when techno carried no cachet in indie rock. "You might as well have said you listened to country music," Maclean says. When Murphy became 6FS's soundman, he built a mammoth PA system that he dubbed Death from Above, a name he also scrawled on a military-style T-shirt that he wore almost every night. Murphy and Maclean liked to think of the PA as their version of a Jamaican dancehall sound system, but with a punk kick: Murphy "would make it so punishingly, deafeningly loud that you had no choice except to deal with it head-on," Maclean recalls. Like Martin Swope in Mission of Burma a decade earlier, Murphy became a de facto fifth member of 6FS...

Unwittingly, Six Finger Satellite were sketching a new canon that the DFA would codify a decade later.... 6FS were often described as a cross between Big Black, Devo, [and] crypto-fascist German electronic duo DAF, whose music [they] openly pillaged. -[The Boston Phoenix]

To be clear, 6FS is/was much more than just a launching pad for DFA. Check out more on the history of the band at the world's most accurate online encyclopedia. Six Finger Satellite recently played Great Scott in Boston, MA (a review from that show here) as well as Machines With Magnets in Rhode Island. Video from R.I. is below.

The Juan Maclean is scheduled to play Webster Hall with The Field. Tickets are still available.

Video below...

Continue reading "Six Finger Satellite together again, playing Brooklyn"