Punks, Parties, and Pills

Take a Screamers-style electro-aesthetic, feed it DIY costumes/instruments/ musical ability, and what comes out the other end? A sound commonly tagged electrotrash, the colorful punk half-sister of the fashionista electroclash phenomenon. The Minneapolis booking agent/record label Freedom From is one of many ground zeros for this uprising, and once again Freedom's talents are channeling a couple of big freaks our way, Viki and Mammal. Viki are the soundtrack to a futuristic space disco where everyone is gacked on cheap powdery substances and the beats are just as jittery as the jawlines. Their singer screams and wails about weird shit like dancing with dogs as the keyboards and beats crackle, bounce, and snap behind her. Mammal played one of Graceland's Monday Fundays last summer, and honestly I can't remember much about them aside from possible masks and junky equipment. Both bands are playing a house show at the Haunt (4730 12th Avenue NE) on Wednesday, August 20, starting around 7:30 pm. Bring cash to donate to the bands. Also on the bill are the fabulous Andrew W. K.-for-the-real-metal-kids, Doomsday 1999, and Display--a band that I'll continue to say has been undernoticed for way too long. I know they're getting a little buzz, but seriously, pay these young men some attention--their Wire-style fascinations and sounds seem to only get stronger, and their shows are getting more and more polished. If you eat up brooding post-punk with a bit of pop jangle, don't pass up this show.

If you're looking to go a little farther than the U-District to see an offbeat show, Freedom From is also organizing an international festival (to take place in Minneapolis on October 4 and 5) that caters to experimental/outsider artists. Slated to play the Festival of Music so far are Thurston Moore, Devendra Banhart, Friends Forever, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Jim O'Rourke, Neil Michael Hagerty, Metalux, and more. Check out www.freedom-from.com/festivalofmusic for more info.

No one really wants to grow up, so the solution is to drink more with every birthday you have to get through--or at least that's the plan for Spits guitarist Sean Wood and Tyco Party drummer and former Elimidate contestant (be sure to ask him about that one) Jeff. Come get these good guys drunk at the Mars Bar on Wednesday, August 20, as they celebrate another step toward maturity (ha) with awesome rock trio the Ruby Doe, whose new release, Dream Engine Blue, is one of the top local rock albums of the summer--heavy on the math and the melodies, it reminds me at times of both Fugazi and Heatmiser. The Spits, everyone's favorite punk band, are playing this show as well, along with other possible musical surprises.

An EP called Splash recently arrived in the mail from Ben Gray, whose newly local project, Garfunkle, is a loungy crossbreed of psychedelic jazz, hiphop, and downtempo; the mind-expanding, atmospheric disc chops up and loops stretches of piano melodies with simple accents of high hat and snare drums, adding drowsy bass lines and hot flashes of scrambled scratching as well. The disc also incorporates passages of rapping in places, but the vocals don't figure cleanly in the mix and the music is the more interesting medium of expression here, even if the tracks tend to sound fairly similar in style by the end. Good mellow mood music.

Our own A-Frames have done quite a bit of touring recently, and thankfully bassist Min Yee has been keeping a careful document of the trio's life on the road--a diary you can check out yourself at www.dragnetrecords.com. Yee documents items such as hanging out in Detroit with the Henchmen, taking "a bottle of clonzapans [sic]" that drummer Lars Finberg found on the floor at Chicago's Blackout festival, and the following interaction with the Black Lips: "Hung out and met the Black Lips from Atlanta. One of them said to me, 'Got a light, shithead?' I figured that was fairly punk rock, and I'm down with punk and kids and stuff. I used to be punk and a kid and that made me the wonderful person I am now, so I go, 'Sure' and give the kid a light." Proving in every way that A-Frames are both attuned to and ahead of the times, this tour diary is interactive, offering sound clips of things like the Spits' performance at the Blackout, threatening answering-machine messages from a drunk, and photos of cheap motels and basements. Check it out.

jennifer@thestranger.com