Recording: The Two Koreas

Artist: The Two Koreas

Song: Monkey On Your Back [Clinic cover]

Recorded at The Dance Cave (DEATH TO T.O. V), October 30, 2015.

The Two Koreas - Monkey On Your Back

For its massive fifth year of Hallowe'en covers, DEATH TO T.O. upsized from its home at The Silver Dollar/Comfort Zone to Lee's Palace and the Dance Cave. That allowed it to keep its sprawling two-stage upstairs/downstairs dynamic even as it accommodated a bigger crowd than ever. Besides curating no fewer than seventeen (!) short sets, Dan Burke and Elliot Jones also kept things running on schedule, with one set starting quite crisply as the one on the other stage ended for nearly the whole night. And as always, the bands put in a lot of work — not just musically, but a lot of the time in trying to capture the look and mannerisms of the band they were covering.

This might have been the set where the band had the smallest conceptual distance to travel from their own identity to the band they were covering. Just throw on some surgical masks and scrubs and voila! Amusingly, Stuart Berman's dance steps rendered the band way less static on stage than I remember the actual Clinic being when I saw in the same building a few years back.