Washington, D.C. - This assignment serves as my escape from Fredericksburg.  I saw an opportunity to break from the plague of cooing, crappy, country rock and neutered indie bands that seem to be the only thing Fredericksburg is producing from its withered and tired loins.  A mood hovers over me - somewhere between stagnation, apathy, and dread.  I have ventured to D.C. to cover the Punk Rock Flea Market at St. Stephen's Church where I will expand on True Womanhood and Imperial China.  The same evening,  I found my way to one of the farther corners of U Street to the Velvet Lounge where I caught Ugly and the Vermillions.  I’ve seen the Vermillions before, and this will serve as a recapitulation of a show previously addressed because they brought a lot more to the table this time around.  Onward...

Arriving a little late and mid-set, the first band I saw perform at the Punk Rock Flea Market was True Womanhood.  Their sound textures can be rich and haunting, similar to the sounds of HEALTH or A Place to Bury Strangers, but I’m starting to think these bands should give up on lyrics altogether.  Rich textures say enough without words botching things.  As a whole, language is too sentimental.  Words are always embarrassing and too revealing.  Seduction resides in the unspoken word, gesture, and gaze, and that’s what True Womanhood had working in their favor during instrumental breaks, rhythmic buildups, electronic sequences, and noise solos.  When it comes t o lyrics, it was always like reading a love letter only to have the woman laugh at you and then send it in installments to CollegeHumor.  Words are always either too ironic, too trite, too blunt, or stabbing so hard at poeticism that the listener is left snickering.  This was my impression after reviewing True Womanhood’s lyrical content on their MySpace page.  However, in live performance, accounting for acoustic space, volume distortion, and withdrawn vocal articulation, words become fragmented and part of the rhythmic cadence that is integral to post rock/avant-punk composition.

Imperial China made no hipster misgivings, and they lacked any anarcho-utopian postures that would seduce a naif at the Punk Rock Flea Market reading table, as if he were a lazy-eyed, deaf dog jumping at a squeak toy.  As they took the stage they announced, “Amateur hour is over.”  No time for a live reading of Chomsky or tracts from the communist underground during this performance.  The percussionist looked as if, at any moment, he would punt his kick drum and obliterate a dilettante punk fan girl or some dandyish, skinny-jeaned boy in the front row.  The aggressiveness of their progressive art-punk compositions reflected an all-too-aware claustrophobic feeling that they’re living in a time and place that alludes to their band’s name.  They’ll probably beat me up for making any snap judgements about the implications of their name, but it’ll be a tastefully violent encounter - an encounter as tactful and disciplined as they are in expressing the intensity in their music.  Masochistic humor was shared between band members over glances and evil grins during the occasional slipped riff, missed lyric, and broken drum stick.  The grinning didn’t suggest an "I’m too cool to care" attitude, but rather an unwavering confidence that if someone were to question the performance, the person in question would leave with shards of drum stick in their eye sockets.  I want to see them in place that isn’t a church, that isn’t overloaded with dirty teenage hipster mustaches, and where there is a stacked bar, so I can watch an aggravated and intoxicated crowd pummel one another as they share the masochistic thrill of fetishizing violence.  Onward to the evening...

From time to time you come across a band that didn’t get the message that everyone hates Chris Carrabba, and in real life Lloyd Dobler would go to jail for doing the shit he did.  Ugly is one of those bands.  At the Velvet Lounge that evening, my esteemed colleague and I felt swindled and compelled to ask for a return on our eight dollar admission fee.  I was excited when I considered the return would allow me to pick up two rail liquor drinks.  My colleague wanted to use the money for grilled cheese and tomato soup.  Clearly we have a different set of priorities.  I wanted to continue flirting with my brightly blue-eyed colleague as we discussed the finer points of Parisian electronica, but a crazed woman somewhere between Rapunzel and Rasputin caught my eye.  This girl was as absurd, goofy, and as far from being self aware as the Scott Pilgrim fangirl Knives.  She kept on about some proto-noise/German industrial band called Wombzpacluhr she just joined with a group of people out of the Adams Morgan neighborhood.  I asked her how I was to type in the umlauts for the proper German spelling, but she didn’t know either.  I couldn’t tell if her dirty, flower child dress and Age of Aquarius half-drunken shuffle was an ironic jab or not.  The ragged cloth and angry Medusa hair is what made her look like Rasputin.  In her defense, she did not have a beard.  If she’s in an industrial band, shouldn’t she be wearing black?  It doesn’t matter, she was the only one fatuous and drunk enough to enjoy Ugly.

After Ugly, to be frank, I was a bit concerned about the Vermillions coming on next, because last time I covered them they seemed bored, and it made me bored.  Their performance was too safe.  I had my reservations about this go round, but being that I’m always fair-minded and never overly critical, I wanted to see them again.  The lead singer and guitarist, Jeremy Flax, sold me my Calvin Klein sneakers, and at that time months ago we discussed how I’d checked his show out and wrote about it.  He smiled with gratitude because a) he hadn’t read my lukewarm review, or b) he really wanted to sell shoes.  Within the first three songs, things went wrong, and I’m glad they did.  The guitar cable kept falling out of the amp, effectively muting or entirely killing the sound.  This debacle seemed to create a bit of anxiety within the singer/guitarist that was channeled appropriately.  If it weren’t for the catalyst, who knows how it would have panned out?  Who knows if Flax would have turned wild-eyed?  But by the end of the performance, Flax had punished the set.  He may be on to something with his solo style - blues  meets noise art.  As the set progressed, the soloing became a more harried mix of monster riffs, succinct blues scales, and pinched accents of noise.  The angry, bowtied Pee Wee Herman let the monster loose, and he evoked a writhing Iggy more than a whining Rivers Cuomo.  All it took was a little agitation from technological malfunction.  Always be wary of the machines.  

All’s fine and fun for now as we piss away time in D.C. rock clubs and church basements, punking around with cherub high schoolers and a bunch of college grads working for non-profits and cultural institutions and foundations that are going to change the world.  They -  we (hell, I’m doing the same as well) - will be with these altruistic jobs a little longer until at last the idealism wanes when tuition loan officers knock a little harder, and everyone’s parents stop buying distortion pedals and amplifiers as birthday gifts, effectively ending that professional musician fantasy for their all too overgrown children.  It ain’t easy working for the good these days when the good don’t seem to be able to cover the cost of being.  It’s easy for that stultifying pessimism to sink back into the bones.  I know I’m personally having a great time avoiding the death rattle of post-imperial Americana and all the empty promises of attempting to attain the socioeconomic stature of the botoxed and emotionally sterilized upper middle class death pit.  Let’s face it folks - economic mobility was a fun little idea that ended with the boomers.  We get to writhe in the dirt while we as up-and-comers watch the remaining resources get burned up on all-you-can-eat pork chop extravaganzas and Mai Tai’s on some retirement cruise in the Caribbean attended by a whole generation of voters that collapsed the future for us.  Maybe I’m being too hard on my generation too soon because of too lofty expectations.  Maybe I’m being too hard on the previous generation for buying homes the size of Lithuania when all you really had to do was house 4.3 people.  After all, I can still get a can of Pabst hipster fodder for dirt cheap.  I’m not homeless most likely because I keep sending in screeds for online publication which will probably come back to haunt my ass when I try to get a mid-level government job, and I’m blacklisted during my clearance check by a simple Google search of my name.  I’m just wondering when I’ll have the opportunity to cover that nameless impoverished virtuoso blues guitarist sittin g on a bucket late at night in front of the National Portrait Gallery, as his sounds reverberate off D.C.’s capitalist cement castles.  With the new Congress, I’m sure many more nameless musicians will join him on the curb, free of the burdens of health insurance and home ownership.  Here comes that overbearing sense of existential anxiety again...

By Correspondent: Mike Blackmore

Mike Blackmore, a Fredericksburg native and D.C. dadaist, is a graduate of the University of Virginia and is cultivating a career based upon Audio Culture.  He is specifically focusing on arts administration, writing, DJing, production, and photography.  When Mike Blackmore is not globe trotting or offending church elders, he is working on his campaigns for 2012 that are a tandem gonzo blitz for both House of Representatives Elect for District 1 and Miss Virginia (a very pretty girl from UVA ran for Miss Virginia and it made Mike jealous).  Mike Blackmore is allergic to church, children and commitment, but likes strong coffee and vodka.