Spray Paint; photograph by Bryan C. Parker
A light sweat covering his face, John Wesley Coleman strummed through a couple of his best C-major compositions kicking off the Monofonus showcase at Hotel Vegas Friday night. With a lighter amount of sarcasm than his usual irony soaked, drunken ramblings contain, Coleman kept things steady, acoustic, and poignant. Bandless, and facing his audience with sunglasses, it was an unusually tender way to commence the evening.
Spray Paint; photograph by Bryan C. Parker
Marriage came to stage and completely eliminated all remnants of tenderness. The no-wave vikings took to stage with percussion galore and enough effects to fund a Michael Bay film. Switching between synths, drums, bass and guitars, the bearded members of Marriage blasted through a manic, thunderous set of overwhelmingly intoxicating noise rock (Boredoms and Flying Saucer Attack come to mind, though understanding they’re former members of Black Eyes and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, it all makes total sense).
Spray Paint; photograph by Bryan C. Parker
Reeling in satisfaction from the previous set and still chatting with multiple pleased attendees lingering around the stage, local punk rabble-rousers Ghetto Ghouls quickly maneuvered their stage set-up. The four-piece took no time gathering momentum, punching into their A.D.D. interpretation of classic punk tropes. Mumbled, spittle-lipped ramblings made sense only in context of the driving guitar/bass interplay, drunkenly convincing the crowd to believe (in what? who even knows).
The Rebel; photograph by Bryan C. Parker
Curiously, as main-act Spray Paint was scheduled to take the stage, so appeared The Rebel. Long loops of keyboard and feedback crept and pressed as the oddly dressed Ben Wallers spun around onstage pawing at his Stratocaster, partly with intent, but with just as much confusion. With one key taped down, a synthesizer droned on as he sang the first notes of his poetic montage. Sending songs through no filter, Wallers spat through a muck of gorgeous slacker hymns. Lyrics mangled with vulgarity and a beautifully awkward vocabulary, the songs somehow ended up somewhere between The Clean and Syd Barrett. Aptly named, The Rebel is an outsider looking for a way in, just not quite knowing how to phrase it.
Spray Paint; photograph by Bryan C. Parker
A not-quite-encore ended with the Spray Paint boys accosting Wallers to play two more, the crowd not disagreeing. At 1 a.m., immediately after his set, they took the stage with enough drunken excitement to raise the crowd to their standards. Guitars in their dissonant perfection chugged through a perfectly timed romp that would sum up the bands entire set. The post-punk fireworks display the followed was filled with every punk show cliché in all the best ways. The songs, sonically, blended altogether with very little in-between, while the audience pushed and swayed with sweat, beer spraying at short intervals. Material from their new record Clean Blood, Regular Acid drove the crowd to a frenzy while the band swung their heads back with every long swig of beer. Through every 20-pound note, the band muscled the set to its breaking point of last call. Lights flickering and floor wet with mysterious liquid, Hotel Vegas was shut down with the purest rock’n’roll integrity. Buy Clean Blood, Regular Acid and records from the rest of the artists via the great people at Monofonus Press.
All photographs © Bryan Parker & Pop Press International; all rights reserved. Click any image to open in slideshow viewer.
