LIVE JOURNAL: FREAKOUT FEST 2021 (Saturday)
It’s Day 2 (er, 3) of Freakout Fest! I’m already exhausted at this point, could definitely use a tea and a blanket, but I’m chugging along because I’m having too much fun.
Saturday night’s festivities were comparatively truncated to the previous day’s, for pretty dumb reasons. That No Joy set the night before was killer, but I ended up staying out way too long and, with my phone on its last breath and few buses in sight, I had to call a rideshare so expensive that it literally cost me my whole budget for the weekend. When did Uber and Lyft become the new Comcast?
So for this night, I gave myself a strict 10:30 PM cutoff point that forced me to hit up as many bands as I could in such a short window. Quantity over quality: that’s the Tape Deck way, right? Seriously, honest apologies to all the bands playing late that I missed. Ya boi prefers a good night’s sleep (and a savings account with something inside it).
Anyway, here’s who I happened to catch Saturday night. Read on!
All thoughts are mine; all experiences are mine. If you don’t like it, you can go [hangry.]
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SAN GABRIEL
I started at the Tractor this time, hoping to catch this dream pop act from Austin. San Gabriel built a setup both humble but brave, as James Bookert stood on stage alone and armed with a guitar, a pedal board, and a drum machine. It’s kind of all anyone needs, really: another reminder of how far we’ve come in live music, where one person can put together a fully-fleshed sound.
Over programmed drum loops, Bookert filtered his guitar through pitch shifters, delays, and other effects while occasionally laying down a synth rhythm on his keyboard. I’ve seen music of this style before live, and, you know, let’s just say an accompanying vocal talent is not a given nor a necessity, but I really liked Bookert’s voice here. It was low, even and quite sweet paired with the light textures and floating quality of his music.
I couldn’t stay for long (unfortunately that’s gonna be a common theme here) but I did catch a lovely little track called “Another One” that married an 80’s synth-pop pulse with a pitched-up guitar lead. Only a few singles exist online, so it’s still quite early for San Gabriel, but you can tell he’s got a solid idea of what he wants to sound like and has the skill to execute it properly.
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BOLERO!
Off to Conor Byrne, where a self-described “freak flag” band from San Fransisco were burning the house down. I counted five people on stage, but it felt like more, perhaps because of the magnitude of Gregorio Perez Figueroa’s presence.
Towering over the stage and garbed in a poncho, he led the band through a set of jams decorated with slide guitar, shakers and bongos. The Latin percussion, played by Josue Santos, specifically stood out as a critical ingredient of the band’s formula; whenever the guitars ceased and the beat stood out, it made an impression. Perhaps that’s part of why the band felt so tight, as they progressed from one hazy, dusty tune to another with the ease of musical lifers. I had no drinks in my bloodstream that night, but by the end of the set I found myself clamoring for a margarita.
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DAVID TUREL
As BOLERO! concluded their set, I gave myself one of two choices. I could stay at Conor Byrne and wait for the next act to take the stage or indulge my curiosity and find out who, exactly, would be playing the “secret show” at Hotel Albatross. I decided on the latter, because I like getting wet and being cold, but unfortunately about ten minutes into their slot the band had yet to set up. Things were moving a touch slow across the board, it seems. With that aforementioned time limit hanging over my head, I made an executive decision to leave and traipse back to where I started. The “secret show” will have to remain a secret (my absolute best guess is that it was probably Styx.)
David Turel and his players had already started playing by then. The Detroit-based band specialized in uptempo, surf-laced psych pop with a hypnagogic edge. It seemed as though they were pulling from several legacy acts at once, especially, to my ears, Australian acts like Tame Impala, Pond and Melody’s Echo Chamber. (Totally off-base side note, but my mind went to Vampire Weekend, I think, purely because the drummer was wearing a turtleneck.) Woozy keyboards, fleet-footed bass lines, and hypnotic rhythms dominated the set as the band, clad in collegiate overwear and leather, led the crowd down a recognizable but compelling rabbit hole. They’re yet another new act I’ll be stoked to see more of down the line.
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SHADOW SHOW
By the time I made it to the top floor of Salmon Bay, another Detroit trio, SHADOW SHOW, was in the process of setting up. Unlike the acts I had seen that night, these folks were streamlined; just guitar, bass and drums, a classic lineup for a classic sound. The sound in question? 60s-based psychedelia and garage, very mod, the kind of music you’d imagine playing in that club at the beginning of the first Austin Powers movie. It’s a simple sound that requires attitude, and because of that it’s very easy to get wrong. That did not happen here.
Despite battling constant feedback issues, SHADOW SHOW pulled it off. Lead singer Ava East laid down a dead-eyed, bedazzled stare as she and her compatriots (bassist Kate Derringer and drummer Kerrigan Pierce) harmonized with aplomb. Derringer’s bass in particular meshed well with the sound on stage – perhaps it was the way it was mixed, or the specific rounded output of the instrument in question, but what wasn’t up in the air was that she and Pierce made for a super tight rhythm section. Something about their sound reminded me of La Luz, another trio with a softer but similarly classic approach. I found it easy to get sucked in, each song blurring into another with a comforting familiarity. Aesthetically, and sonically, this band’s already got it down pat.
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JANGO
At the end of last night’s Black Tones set (you know, the one where Eva Walker’s rig collapsed and she crowd-surfed in response) a rapper from Spokane took the stage to freestyle as the crowd sang along. The band said we had to check him out, and I like to follow orders, so I took the opportunity to see Jango live in my third trip to Conor Byrne that night.
Bear in mind, I had heavily enjoyed everything I’d seen up to that point, but this was the first time all night that I felt an artist was really putting it all on the line. Jango rapped like I imagine Kendrick Lamar rapped during his Overly Dedicated era, when he was still a relatively unknown name and hungry to prove to everyone how much he wanted it.
Fire? This guy was an inferno. From the moment he took the stage had the place enraptured, bouncing and raging to his socially-conscious lyrics and hard-lined beats. Take my perception with a grain of salt, but this was Ballard, so we were dealing with a significant amount of white people in their mid-to-late thirties. It takes a titanic force to get such a demographic as agitated as they were, which is a testament to how effective Jango is at what he does.
He had the flow of performance down, too. One track saw him encouraging moshing (with apropos mention, of course, of the Astroworld tragedy a week prior), and moments afterward, reading the crowd’s level of energy, he pared back and allowed the crowd to react on their own terms. Throughout, he never let up on the throttle, delivering a smoking-hot run of raps that left a huge impression on me. His message was clear – Spokane’s got something to say.
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MARGARITAS PODRIDAS
This ended up being the last act I caught before begrudgingly heading out, but it was perhaps the one I was most excited to catch all weekend. The first time I heard Sonora, Mexico’s Margaritas Podridas was on the song below, and it legit stopped me in my tracks. I actually missed my light rail stop because of it. The band plays so loose and so heavy they felt less like a group of musicians and more like a force of nature, like a freak typhoon making landfall on a shore. When Carolina Enríquez screams you feel it from inside you, as if she’s a necromancer connecting to a buried trauma point and resurrecting it, zombie-like. I needed to see this band in person.
They did not disappoint. The four-piece stood on stage like zombies themselves, both Enríquez and Esli Meuly done up like porcelain dolls with strikingly haunted eye makeup. They all seemed so young, and perhaps a little nervous on stage, but they killed it. Holy god did they kill it. I had to constantly remind myself while I was there that I had a job to do, because I kept subconsciously wanting to just put down the camera and lose myself in the music. Suffice it so day I had a lot of overly blurry shots to sort through the next day.
You know the two-guitar shoegaze approach is nothing new, but Meuly and fellow guitarist Rafael Armenta were super good at layering textures and melodies together to create something bigger than the sum of their parts. Songs like “Púrpura” have delicate arpeggios embedded in their haze, barely imperceptible but adding to the band’s sublime, melancholy sound. There were softer, slower moments like the ecstatic “Wow” that showcased versatility, but the highest moments of the set arguably arrived with the harder material. “Margaritas” had such a great chord structure and a rollicking looseness it felt almost like early Velvet Underground, while the grungier material off of their 2018 record Porcelain Mannequin stood out as well.
Again, it’s a shame no one felt like moshing, because the energy these folks put out certainly called for it. Maybe this was just the wrong venue for them; I picture them at a punk or house show absolutely tearing up the place, uprooting the furniture. They play KEXP next week, so if you didn’t get the chance to see them this night, tune in there, because I doubt you’ll be disappointed.
Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed BOLERO!’s percussionist as Andre Moyo. Punishment has been decided and doled out accordingly.
Lives in Seattle, terrible diet, loves music, has hope for people