NXNE 2012: Day Two

So, unfortunately I didn’t really have time to enjoy much of NXNE this year as I was working doing set up for the Much Music Video Awards for which I was paid, admittedly, very well. So that’s unfortunate, but watcha gonna do, expenses need to be paid. But Thursday night I did go and check out a couple bands, so here’s what I saw.

First band I saw on Thursday was Rituals, who were great. I’m a big fan but I’d never seen them play a legit venue like the El Mocambo. I saw them play the Garage and The Port, and both times they were using like a pretty, um, ‘modest’ PA. At the El Mo they sounded big, bad, and incredibly loud. But they had power and were really, really cool. I hope they keep moving up and believe they will.

I headed over to the Silver Dollar next to see Bleached but they’d been bumped from like 11 to 1 or something so I went back to the El Mo and saw Dusted, the new project from Brian Borcherdt (Holt Fuck) and Leon Tehony, the drummer from Rituals. They were ok – sounded kind of like Borcherdt’s solo stuff + a drummer, even when they were doing this kind of crunchy stuff that had almost a Death From Above 1979 aesthetic, though compositionally was nothing like the stuff from that band. Some of it was also acoustic (stylistically) also. On their recordings online they sound dreamy and lo-fi but I definitely don’t remember them sounding anything like that live.

Last band was A Place To Bury Strangers and they were pretty fucking badass. Songs? Don’t really remember much by way of songs, but I remember a lot of cool lights and sick guitars sounds bashing out post-punk shoegazy badassery. So yeah, that was sick.

And then we went for Chinese food.

On Saturday we tried to go see Bleached again but for some reason the lineup to get into Silver Dollar (where they were playing again) was like retardly long.  So that was kind of all I got to see this year for North By… But what I did see was solid.