DJ, Blow My Speakers Up

[This episode brought to you by Release The Kraken Please's first ever guest blogger Baby S!]

This week has brought some amazing revelations, so I decided to take a weekend off and celebrate a little, and of course Madame Kraken, my life partner in crime, was along for the ride. The weekend culminated in a trip out Colfax to the Bluebird to see A Place To Bury Strangers and The Big Pink. Weirdly, Becky left her camera at home (I know! Totally out of character), so I made do with my iPhone to document the blessed event.

It was a gorgeous day. I snagged Miss Becky from her place and we car-danced to Lady Gaga remixes and a stupid-sick track by Ke$ha (yeah, the dollar sign is dumb, but the song Tik Tok is infectious!) while we beelined to Mezcal for what are usually awesome Dark-n-Stormies and some pre-show nosh. Becky and I made the acquaintance of this little dude on the way in:

And an older gentleman told me I looked like his Uncle Sidney. Mazel tov!

I could spend the whole post bitching about how lousy the service was at Mezcal, but I'll let some Twitter extracts do it for me:

NePlusUltra Mezcal w/ @hauntologist...he looks handsome! Pixies pin!

hauntologist The vast incompetence of our waiter at Mezcal is a good argument against legalizing marijuana.

hauntologist We just had a "moment" with our waiter. Free round of Dark & Stormies? Yes, please. 

NePlusUltra  Mezcal service sucks, but the tortilla soup just blew my brains out!

We got through that misery with full bellies and free drinks, and mozied across the street to the Bluebird, one of my favorite tiny theaters in Denver (which is something Denver does well that other music towns I've lived in like Minneapolis and New York don't even have. Maybe it's a Wild West thing?). Oh, and by the way, if you read this blog and you're not following Becky & I on Twitter, what are you thinking? Losers.

Anyhoo, we get in and are met by the inept musical stylings of the inexplicably ubiquitous DJ Boyhollow. We've been annoyed by him at more than one alternative/electro show and we'd like for him to retire, please. Becky said it best:

NePlusUltra DJ Boypussy bores the shit out of me...

The crowd was cool. Older, a little more mellow. There were parents with their teenage kids rocking out together. Our people, really.

Of course there were some scuzzie weirdos too, and some totally amazing freakshows and fashion disasters:

NePlusUltra At the sight of an albino 'fro having hunchbacked hipster, @hauntologist says, "Wow, that's sort of NEAT!"... 

hauntologist What is that poor girl wearing? Is she doing penance? Bagging potatoes?

hauntologist Inexplicably, I think it's weirdly hot when sort of doughy hipster dudes wear horizontal stripes. @NePlusUltra is with me on this one.  

And the dude standing in front of me during the first band, Io Echo, had the flippiest hair. Io Echo were o.k. Their most notable feature was their smoking hot bassist (in all senses of the word, I wish my iPhone took better pictures). Come to think of it, all of the bands had hot bassists. Hmmm. Anyway, here's Io Echo. Apparently one of their songs is in a commercial or somesuch:

Things really started to heat up when A Place To Bury Strangers took the stage and fucking took over our brains.

I told Becky they sounded like if Echo and the Bunnymen kidnapped the bunny-cute boys from The Drums and made them do acid with Martin Atkins in a basement for a month and then put them on tour.

 

But what they really sounded like was themselves, tearing the world apart and putting it back together again.

They were amazing. People danced, Becky swooned, and the tinnitus was totally worth it. If they venture to your neck of the woods, it'd be an evening well spent if you go see them.

 Becky is good for many things. One of them is fetching cocktails. 

The Big Pink were up next and we weren't sure what we were in for. What we were in for was something pretty effing amazing.

The lead singer is tiny, elfish, mohawed, with the rippedest arms I've seen on a boy in a while. Like if Brian Molko had a butch younger brother. Or something. He had a cool, yelpy voice and definitely held the crowd's attention, even though he had, yes, a hot bass player and the coolest lady drummer to compete with. They're a tight outfit, and I want to see them again.

They made magic. And we were caught up in it. As I so often find myself, when I'm out with Ms. Becky, I felt at home in the chaos, making our own little eye of the storm. The one disappointment was that none of the bands had buttons. Honestly.

I don't know if The Big Pink did an encore because we scampered out during the last song to head home to our respective beds and dream of our evening and plot other adventures. See you next time.

XO

Baby S.