I'm Willing To Be Disliked

I'm not sure what they did with all the trash cans that used to be around Roggie's, but all of a sudden you gotta walk clear to the Dunkin' Donuts on the other side of Cleveland Circle just to throw your lemonade bottle away. I guess I should appreciate the exercise, but nah, I'd rather just complain about it. I've been noticing this in other places around Massachusetts, too, like in front of the Flywheel; for some reason Massachusetts is getting rid of trash cans at the same time they're adding more toll booths. Makes sense, right? This was also the same night as Game Seven of the Bruins-Canadiens series, meaning that whole neighborhood was crawling with Bruins "fans" and the game was on the TVs downstairs at Roggie's while the bands were playing, and if that's not a night of entertainment then I guess it isn't. Neutral Fixation started things off with their mix of Void-shifty hardcore tempos and weird noise shit, which at this point (now that both bands were in the same room right in front of me) finally wised me up to the fact that what they and NASA Space Universe are doing aren't all that far apart. I guess it's the way that the vocalist sounds like Tommy Perkins sometimes that was throwing me off before. Really, NeuFix were a full-on mess the first time I saw them (last year) but they put together a set that was way more coherent this time, and they even totally jammed-out in spots, like when they got to the Cream "Born Under a Bad Sign" rip that comes up twice in "Down in The Dirt". Pretty mean stuff. As I've said before (in a zine that none of you read), as sketchy as NeuFix might sometimes be live, their recordings are all fairly mighty, so you should maybe google the Tampered Reels bandcamp one of these days and see what's up.

Zipperhead were nuts and completely shredded the place, I don't know why I didn't bother to pick up their demo while it was still around (probably because I didn't think their track on "Harsh & Hard" was all that great -- once again, I'm pretty dumb sometimes) but I was practically in awe as I watched their set, in between dodging all the shit that was flying. Boston's pretty hot right now so there's probably at least five other Boston bands as good or better that I'm just not aware of yet, but are there any Boston bands that I've seen over the past, say, 12 months that are better than Zipperhead? NO. How psyched am I to be moving up here? (Not completely, I mean, there's a lot of Patriots fans, but still.) I can't say that I could describe Zipperhead in any way that would make sense -- their sound is probably a lot closer to the "raw punk" thing that the d-beat/noisecore stuff that I'm more used to -- so I'll leave that to someone else, I mean, don't ask me these things, I don't even rate enough to get the address to the Boiler Room yet.

Then NASA Space Universe came on and totally raged, of course, they've got some extended harsh noise stuff in their catalog but live they're just straight-up rock and they pretty much clobbered everyone sideways. I missed them when they played someone's backyard in Western Mass a couple of years ago, so I was glad to be able to catch them this time, and they brought a bunch of tour goodies with them, including an LP of seven new songs plus the "ICE" EP from 2012 on the flip; that's one of the new songs down below. NSU were on tour with OFF!, if you can imagine that (hey House of Blues, hey Vince Neil, hey Punk Rock Bowling), but I forgot to ask them if they had any good stories, since right now I could use a couple.


NASA Space Universe -

"E.G.M."

Zipperhead -

"Rotting in The City"

Neutral Fixation -

"Down in The Dirt"