Blood on the Wall with Thee Oh Sees and Erase Errata

THEE OH SEES

So first off, I love John Dwyer. He fronted my favorite band (Coachwhips) of the last 15 years and put out 4 records and a rarities comp, 2 of those albums being total fucking classics. He also created a fictional german bass explosion called Zeigenbock Kopf, and played facemelting noise guitar in the Hospitals, Burmese, and Pink and Brown and is now also fronting a band called Yikes!!. As a young coachwhips fan, I picked up a CD labeled OCS, which billed itself as Dwyers “acoustic and noise collage recordings”. I labeled it self-indulgent bullshit (its great, I just didn’t like acoustic guitars) and went back to my coachwhips records. Fast forward 2-3 years and OCS are Thee Ohsees and have expanded by 3 members to bring you swampy heroin-garage with pretty harmonies and noise breakdowns.

What I’m trying to tell you is that this guy fucking rules and so does his new band. A few weeks ago they opened for (and completely upstaged) Blood on the Wall and Erase Errata. Live the band leans more towards garage stomp, and even do a few coachwhips-y uptempo jams, before Dwyer unplugs his guitar and sticks the cable in his mouth while running it through some pedals, thereby going through the list of basically everything I want to see in a rock show. One dude who’d sharpied spiderwebs on his face was dancing up a storm throughout the set. As it turns out, if you sweat, sharpie runs, so by the end of the set, this guy was workin up a black sweat (apologies to prince).


ERASE ERRATA

Erase Errata are one of those boring 3rd wave postpunk bands. They’re basically one of the bands you see at the smell and forget their name when you tell people who played that night. I bailed after like 2 songs to go bug Dwyer. I feel like a lot of the crowd did. Blood on the Wall are solid. I doubt I’m ever gonna listen to one of their records all the way through, but you can count on them to play some shit you can pogo to. These guys are really stoked on the 90’s and very little else and they play some loudquietloud poppy vaguely punk derived yelpfests that’ll always sound better live than on record but just aren’t all that cool live. I dunno, they’re having a lot of fun and playing exactly the kind of music they wanna make, and the crowd was into it, so what I think doesn’t matter too much. They’ve got one pretty rad song, Mary Susan, which they had the good sense to close with. When we got out of the show my friend turned to me and said “wow, some guy who really wants to be Frank Black found a girl who really wants to be Kim Deal,” which I think sums the band up. It turns out they’re actually brother and sister, which to me would say this band was meant to be if they were better. Theyre definitely a band I thought I’d like a lot better than I did. I dunno, I fucking hated the 90’s.


PS: Sorry to BLOOD ON THE WALL for my friend yelling freebird. That shit is fucking inexcusable.

- JOHNNY MOTORCYCLE