Vaz, Growing
w/ Glass Candy now Roxy Music, Die Monitor Bats

Thurs Jan 3

Disjecta, 118 NE Russell

The stupid holidays are officially over. Surely you sustained battle scars, such as watching your Uncle Bill get completely wasted on Wild Turkey and trying to play golf on the Super Nintendo. Perhaps he even tried to touch your ass, which is gross, but not as gross as it could be, since he is your Uncle Bill purely by marriage. Or maybe your parents gave you guilt trips for not visiting them, and you love them, but you can’t be around them. Whatever fucked you up this winter season, I officially declare it OVER. Holiday demons begone! To celebrate, let’s talk about a toughass show you may attend, starring Vaz and Growing, that will wash away the horrors from your weighted breast like a godless baptism in guitar noise.

Opening this show will be Portland’s very entertaining and hilarious quartet Die Monitor Bats, who are a bit like scientists–scientists of art, that is. The band consists of very solid drumming–sometimes in the dance-punk vein–demented skronked-out saxophone, scrappy, scraping guitar, and a vocalist who is clearly in another dimension, reciting her lyrics lethargically and sporadically over the winding din of chaos. Unfortunately, this will be Die Monitor Bats’ last show, because 3/4 of the band is moving back to their hometown of Miami Beach.

Next up: Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre, Portland’s fashion-alert, glam-scream trio, will be ambitiously performing an entire set of Roxy Music covers. G.C.’s drummer is purportedly on holiday in Brazil, so it remains to be seen whether the performance will merely consist of singer Ida No and bassist/ sometimes guitarist John David V. (And will they be performing “Avalon”?)

Truly the beginning of the spectacle of mind-erasers will be Olympia band Growing, introducing a grounding whirlpool of sound that will whisk you away from the annoyingly paggro (passive-aggressive) manipulations of your holiday-burdened family. The band sprouted from the ashes of longtime basement show stalwarts Black Man White Man Dead Man. Growing’s music consists of heavy, slow, monotonic guitar drones backed up by sparkling samples and subtle movements. It is very science-nerdy, a bit like hanging out in the planetarium, or the kind of thing an audiophile would love to crank on his or her new surround-sound rig. Luckily, Growing’s Joe DeNardo has assured us that they will, indeed, be “extremely loud.” In addition to this promise, their earthquaking sound will be enhanced by visuals and a slideshow, some of which are provided by Northwest photography group Thin Ice.

Vaz consists of Apollo Liftoff and Jeff Mooridian Jr., also known as two of the scary/great ex-members of Amphetamine Reptile ingenues HAMMERHEAD. If their recorded material is any indication (including Demonstrations in Micronesia, on the radical Load Records), Vaz are going to bend our minds with their often-slow-but-oh-so-heavy, toe-tapping numbers! They’re good, because they play their music loudly and heavily, like their guitar and drums are made of molten iron, but do not play into my fears of those sorts of bands always being ONLY about minor keys and monotony, because that’s so damn testosteroney. In other words, like Hammerhead, they are not playing heavy, noisy music purely because they have dude angst. In fact, a couple of times, Apollo even sings in a little vibrato, exposing a soft pink tenderness in his heart that is only mildly offset by Jeff’s bitchin’ drumming. (Music Dork Factoid: At certain points, Jeff uses the cymbal–in place of the typical utilization of the high-hat–for his sixteenth-note percussion, making him sound even heavier, tougher, and more like a badass in general). Vaz goes all the way, people.

The moral of this story is, when the holidays/Seasonal Affective Disorder turn you into a cynical, bruised monster, the best thing to do is go to a heavy, noisy, underground rock show that none of your family would be caught dead at, unless they’re having a midlife crisis. It is a form of rock and roll rebellion, and it has been this way since the beginning. (Of time.)