Gig: The Hoa Hoa's

The Hoa Hoa's (The Disraelis / Your 33 Black Angels / Action Makes)

The Silver Dollar Room. Friday, December 4, 2009.

It had been a good week for The Hoa Hoa's — just like in some of their songs, a long slow burn had turned into an intense frenzy and a lot of solid legwork from the Optical Sounds crew had paid off with some nice media attention, including making the cover of eye weekly. After the earlier warm-up at Sonic Boom, the payoff was this official album release show in the classy confines of the Silver Dollar Room,¹ all in honour of their fab new Pop/Drone/Pedals disc.

Definitely worth showing up early on this night, as The Disraelis led things off. I've tried in the past to nail what it is that's so appealing about their sound, and I can't add much to what I've said before. There's just a sort of delicious tension between Colin Bowers' crystalline guitar lines and Cameron Ingles' opaque murmurs, a collision between heightened rationality and bleary oblivion — like drinking six shots of vodka and then trying to have a discussion about Kant. Or, more emotionally, like those moments where you suddenly gain a flash of sky blue clarity into your own failings, accompanied by a resounding desire to do whatever is necessary to obliterate it. The set included some new material (such as the tasty "January") that leaves me eager for the band to get a new release out. With recent uptick in recognition for The Hoa Hoa's, their stablemates are now overdue for some of that spotlight as well.

Listen to a track from this set here.

Bathed in blue light, Your 33 Black Angels hit the stage like they were playing a Byrds cover of a Dylan song cut with some "Summertime Blues" rock'n'roll energy. Six members deep, featuring three guitars and saturating garage-style organ, they mixed equal parts flower punk and paisley underground. But notwithstanding those touchstones, the band didn't limit themselves to any one narrow retro-stylistic patch of ground, generally mixing things up enough to make it interesting and always keeping a quick, steady beat (courtesy of John O'Callaghan) to drive things home. Most frequent singer — they mixed it up a bit — Josh Westfal's guitar featured glow-in-the-dark psychedelic flowers and designs, but the incipient hippietude of that and a are-you-ready-for-the-patchouli shirt was undercut, I noticed later, by the fact that he was wearing a New York Dolls tee underneath. And that's as apt a metaphor for this band as I could muster. A well-suited addition to this lineup, the NYC visitors put together a solid set and impressed the growing crowd.²

Listen to a track from this set here.

Hitting the stage just past 12:30, The Hoa Hoas's led off with "Waves". Starting low on the intensity scale, the band played a smartly constructed set that kept raising the stakes, building up in speed and energy, letting things plateau for a bit, and then amping things up again. Ironically, the longer set afforded them by headlining their album release show also gave them a chance to dig into the catalogue a bit, such as for Sonic Bloom's "The List", which I don't think has gotten an airing for awhile, as well as some of the cuts from the new album like short, punkish burst "Intensity" that are not usually in the live set. Also keeping with the celebration of the new album, the band were joined on "Grew Up on the Seeds" by Planet Creature's Kristina Koski, adding some of the rockin' flute grooves that aren't usually there in live performance.

The crowd was tightly packed in and dancing in surging waves. Maybe it was a fever dream, but it seemed like someone in the crowd (fortunately not near me) was playing a harmonica briefly. During the droning groove of "Looking For the Sun" it all really started to kick in. Not just the music, but the light show — machine gun bursts of strobes from one side of the stage, and swirling multicolored lights from the other.³

The band played "Postcards" a bit slower than they had earlier in the evening at their in-store appearance, simmering in the groove of it a little more. By the time they reached the set-closing tandem of "Vinyl Richie" and "Blue Acid Gumball", the experiential overload of sound and light and shouty thrum was nearly veering into dazed synaesthesia. Perhaps — perhaps — not the best sounding, best played set I've heard from The Hoa Hoa's, but certainly the most correct.

Listen to a track from this set here.

If the Black Angels complemented the Hoa Hoa's at the more flower-powered end of their range, then Action Makes overlapped with the headliners at the other end of their sound, over in the scuzzy garage-rock zone.⁴

Not so sloppy as some bands of this ilk play it — the had a tight underpinning throughout — the band nevertheless had a reasonable amount of leering attitude on stage. Thanks in no small part to vocalist Clint Rogerson, the band evoked a party vibe — not one of your hippy-dippy be-ins, though, more of an end-of-the-night vibe, where you get fucked up not to aim for some kind of transcendence so much as to regain functionality after the last binge. Even if there were still a healthy number of folks up around the stage dancing away, it gave the room, now emptier as last call came and went, a different kind of vibe. Dan Burke, for example, was right up front, boogieing away, pausing every few minutes to aim a kick or two at the nearest monitor. In fact, maybe that's an apt vision to hold in your mind when thinking of an Action Makes gig: imagine Dan Burke's boot kicking a stage monitor, forever and ever. The set, nine songs in thirty-five minutes, ended with things getting unglued a bit, a few uncontrolled squeals of feedback and concluding with drummer Ryan Rothwell tumbling over his drum kit.

Listen to a track from this set here.

A late end to the night, but worth it for a rather fab show. And hopefully a successful bit of consciousness-raising for The Hoa Hoa's.

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¹ Speaking of that extra touch of elegance: I noticed that in the men's room, there was no soap in the dispensers, but someone had thoughtfully left a plastic cup half-filled with liquid soap on one of the sinks. At least I hope it was liquid hand soap.

² And checking out Y33BA's website, it looks like the favour is being returned, with the Hoa Hoa's heading down to NYC to join 'em on New Year's eve, a trip which will hopefully gain some new converts for the local side.

³ This light was being held up and swung around by a guy standing right in front of the stage. Whether he was a friend of the band drafted for this job or just someone who took it unto himself to do this, it fit the vibe of the night particularly well.

⁴ An acquaintance that I ran into at the show was slightly confused, earlier on, when I explained that one of the "opening" acts was, in fact, playing after the headliner, but that's just how things roll at the late-night Silver Dollar shows.