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Bellyache/ Creve Coeur/ Other People's Money, Lunch Paper, 5/18/06

by The Bridge
05/25/2006

The thing about the Lunch Paper (a downtown bar and favorite amongst our fine hamlet's finely tattooed and pierced) is ambience. Five-star restaurants and high dollar martini bars can go whistle when it comes to ambience, as far as I'm concerned. You gotta go to a sticky ol' waterin' hole for real ambience.

Ambience is mostly Toothless Johnny hanging in the corner booth with a smile and an incomprehensible greeting for everyone. It's the inevitable disco ball in a bar where playing disco music will basically get your ass kicked. It's the Halloween decorations that in all probability went up, oh, around Christmas of '98 and never came down. It's pictures of porn stars and plastic busts (well, one) of Gene Simmons, gargoyle collections (Gargoyle Collections is a terrible name for a band. Someone please use it), and Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" playing in closed caption whilst the band plays and dudes pull their dudettes, by the belt loops, onto their laps. It's why you go, and it's why you can tolerate just about any stripe of live music that's offered within those grimy walls.

The sincere but wet-behind-the-ears blues-daddy mimicry of Bellyache started my Thursday evening off (I missed openers Blank Faces). There's an acoustic guitar and an upright bass, and these two white boys - brothers Austin and Caleb Darnell - showing some love for old corner-blues standards - or at least, I think the set was mostly old standards. Songs about wanting some of a young lady's candy, that sort of thing. Bellyache are a little ragged, but they've got the soul of the material down pretty well, and they seem comfortable in classic blues-guy roles: the bassist made a fine wingman, handling backup vocals with an offhand yet reliable manner, and the lead vocalist/guitarist had a clear love for performing in general and improv in particular. Plus, the set was delivered at an unusually comfortable sound level - always audible, but with a little room to breathe - and chat, if you so desired, which is what you want with this kind of laid-back music.

As for the next band, Atlanta's Creve Coeur - well, thank God for Cartoon Network.

I suppose that sounds harsh. They weren't all bad, for a substandard Interpol band-wagon jumper. I know that Interpol themseles are derivative as all hell. But, you see, it's okay to rip off prior genius, it's periodically neccessary, to keep the wheels of rock'n roll moving - provided you follow, by my count, two simple rules:

1) Do it really well.

On this point, Creve Coeur doesn't completely fail. What they brought to the table were some catchy, new-wave rippin' tunes with the usual mix of Joy Division, the Cure, and New Order showing at the seams. Their formula is updated with a touch of 99x-ish pop-punk motor in the rhythms. The lead singer has the quavering, underwater style vocals that so many of these bands favor, and he sounds heartfelt and soulful in the same way that that guy from Dashboard Confessional does (hint to adolescents: this is not exactly a compliment). The songs are solidly constructed, but only because they are so unerringly formulaic. Technically, though, they're pretty proficient.

2) Do it first.

I mean, it's not like you gotta be the first guys ever to do it - surely someone had beat the Strokes to cribbing from Teleision's catalog. But no one was evidently mining that particular scene when they came out with "Is This it?" (Is that it? I can't remember and I ain't looking it up. You know, their debut), and no one had for a while - thus the frenzy. Every vaguely synthy-punky NYC band worth their salt has mined Ian Curtis' ouevre of late, which is why this stuff sounds so stale right now.

The closing band was newly formed Other People's Money, a two-person project featuring everyone's favorite music-townie-workhorse, Dan Korn, on drums and Michelle Hutchins on vocals and guitar. Fear not, it's not another White Stripes-type jam. This is straight up, peppy rockachicky fun. Hutchins is clean and crisp with a power chord-indeed, pretty assured on the guitar overall. The pair never sounded stripped down or low energy, due in no small part to Korn's able drumming. Who needs a bassist to keep things steady when you got this guy? Certainly not Hutchins, who never seemed to break a sweat as she commanded the room with a full, flirty voice that had the bounce of, say, Belinda Carlisle, but much more oomphy, kinda like Exene Cervena of X.

This is music to get your summer speeding tickets to, with its aimiably goofy good-time lyrics. Sample line: "I go down like a cheap trick whore" - and she does. Well, that is to say, Hutchin's tunes have a lot of Cheap Trick reverence in them. In fact, after the band obliged the bar with a quickie encore, she farewelled us with "Thank you ery much, we're Cheap Trick, good night." I'm betting Cheap Trick would be flattered to be admired by a gal with songs like "She's a Bitch" (apparently about her bitchy cat) and "New Sweater": "I got a new sweater/Three days and three weeks later/You called me a player hater/Well, I didn't like you anyway... And it's all because/I got a new sweater."