It List: Thursday

Child Bite/Sohns/Lisa Frank (The Nightmare): Child Bite is often described as art rock and I just don't know if that means what it did ten years ago, let alone forty years ago, when the term started being thrown around a lot. Now-a-days it most likely means that the band plays music that is:

A. Safely described as "angular" by lazy writers that don't want to really think about a group's influences.
B. Contains songs longer than three minutes.
C. Doesn't sound like, oh, I don't know...Dawes. That's a safe festival rock band to use as an example.

So, this is the face of art rock in 2010. It sounds more like male-pattern-baldness, late 80's, DC Hardcore more than anything else I can think of, but that's fine and I'm sure they put on quite a show.

Lisa Frank is a gang of what sounds like the worst jean-jacketed, cigarette-smoking girls from your old middle school recording on a boom-box after keying cars all afternoon. I have been really beaten down by all the Austin garage rock that I'm "supposed" to like from the past 18 or so months especially, but that's okay. They're from San Antonio! I'm glad that bands like this can still exist and not be horrible. The songs on their page are so ridiculously over-driven that it transforms their music into a completely different experience than you would expect from three chord punk songs, and of course, that's the point.

RTB2/Old Snack (The Belmont located at 901 Fort Worth Avenue in Oak Cliff): Two Denton favorites perform poolside at The Belmont to raise funds for The Texas Theater, which is certainly a worthy cause. Can anyone name all the bands Ryan Becker is in? A small group of us were doing this at a party recently and having a tough time of it. I need to get out of The Metroplex for a while.

ADD: The Fleshtones (Double Wide)