So first up for the night was Olivia Mancini of Olivia Mancini and the Housemates or Olivia and the Mates or whatever the full band goes by (or if there is even is a full band anymore). I've never seen her live, and I'm only familiar with material off the Housemates' album, This Kind of Life. I saw that she was playing alone on the billing, and yet I somehow assumed that she would be playing with the full band. A little background information for those of you who have never been to the Black Cat: most people are familiar with the main room located upstairs but there is a smaller venue located downstairs behind the Red Room bar area. Often at these shows, I will wait outside in the bar area until the band takes the stage. I was waiting outside when Olivia took the stage, and started playing. Without the noise of the full band that I was expecting, I was unaware that she was playing until I glanced through the window of the door to the Back Room. Once I made it inside I was pleasantly pleased. Despite having missed the majority of her set, I was able to catch two songs and the tail end of another. Off the bat, Miss Mancini has a natural talent for stage banter that is almost a requirement for playing venues this intimate. Albeit she can tend to ramble, but overall the banter is friendly and entertaining. She asked the crowd if they had read In Cold Blood. In turns out reading it had nothing to do with the song so much as knowing what Doc Savage is. The character Doc Savage is a silver age comic hero who was super smart and occasionally experimented on criminals. I already find women that play music attractive, but couple that with the fact that she has a song that is reference to an obscure silver age pulp comic hero? Forget about it. She closed with Jealous Type, which is my favorite song of hers. So I only heard two songs from her set, but frankly I feel like I heard the cream of the crop. I'm definitely checking out her next show.
I already mentioned what Ryan McLaughlin was like throughout his band, Typefighter's set and the subsequent Pash set. I did not mention that despite being incredibly inebriated he and his band were able to deliver incredibly catchy semi-folky pop music. His voice is somewhat reminiscent of a higher pitched John McCauley of Deer Tick. While of similar ilk they do not run into that problem with many folk bands of having their music all sounding the same. I was incredibly impressed with the McGuyver-ish rigging of a mic to the autoharp utilized by McLaughlin. Again, the banter, while impishly slurred, was very entertaining. The band interaction, even though fueled by Ryan's drunkenness, was friendly and somewhat endearing. This was increased when the band left their places on stage and went down among the crowd only accompanied by the autoharp and sang their last song. Just having returned from Spain (more on that in a future post), I was really pissed that I was broke and had no cash for the EP. I'll be sure to check them out when they return from SXSW.
Pash. I already gave my impression of the event. They played a lot of new stuff (Well, new to me). If they've published it, I can't find it. If anyone has it, I'd love to get a copy of it. As I said in my previous post, their sound has only matured and layered in new sounds making each track more enjoyable than the previous album. Despite Ryan's many interjections, I felt that it was an adequate send off for the band. I would kill for a set list just to be able to better give the run down. I just remember one song being a little harder than I'm used to from the band, but in a good way. They kept things dancy on other songs which I've really come to enjoy and makes it easy to compare to bands like The Kills or Gossip. Again, being tapped on cash, meant I couldn't grab a limited edition shirt at the end of the show.
Overall, a great show for a Tuesday night; would've been a great show on Friday night, in my opinion. I love this city and everything about it: the music, the food, the art, the people (well most of them). I don't quite know where that came from but I'll just say this: shows like this remind me why I push and support local music and I'll continue to do so as long as bands like these keep making music.
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