80* at Midnight

Last night on the way home from Spaceland it was 80 degrees outside, at midnight! Now imagine yourself inside Spaceland with 400 of your closest hipster pals with no A/C... It was like wrapping up in a wool blanket and sitting in a sauna.

The occasion? To watch Midnight Movies in their new lineup and then close with Darker My Love. Midnight Movies now features the drummer/singer as a singer with a new drummer (good move) but their show seemed firmly rooted in early 80s Siouxsie & The Banshees territory, a la "Juju." Not necessarily a bad thing, but, ah, familiar.

Darker My Love did not look the part. Their music is a garage cacophony of psychedelic noise. When a guy walked on stage with a knit hat and a foot long beard, looking like the captain of a fishing trawler, it caused puzzlement. Not against the beard, though. A knit hat in 120 degree heat? That's fucking maniacal. The drummer also needs to sort it out, pronto. He can choose 1 of the following options he was rocking: 1. horn-rimmed nerd glasses, 2. beefy tattooed arms, 3. knit hat, 4. long stringy hair. And the final snarky comment goes to the singer: dude, get a clean shirt! I don't want to start thinking about laundry when I'm watching your band. He was rocking an inside-out dirty "white" v-neck shirt, and the thought that the dirty side we were seeing was the inside of the shirt, uh, hey man, Cobain's fucking dead, and so is the dirty junkie thing.

Anyway, Bryan, Charles, and Marcus, critics all, seemed generally chuffed on the show. Both Midnight Movies and Darker My Love are the resident bands Monday nights at Spaceland this month, get off yer lazy asses and go.