Recher-Theatre

Caught another live show of one of my favorite bands last week at the Recher Theatre in Towson, MD. The act was Rx Bandits and Dredg with Zechs Marquise opening and it was a great show. The Recher is a great venue for these smaller shows. They’ve got bars on two of the walls of their rectangle, there’s more than enough room for a decent-sized show, and the size of the place gives you a nice intimate feeling with the bands that are playing. Like most shows, nothing really goes on for the openers. There might be a few diehard fans come to see the band play, but in general the crowd is mostly dispersed and moderately interested. The beauty of that night’s opener was that Zechs Marquise was playing a solid set and they actually got some of the more skeptical and jaded members of the audience, such as myself, interested in what they were doing up on stage. A mostly experimental group, their sound is complex with two guitars and a drummer, but no lyrics. The genre makes sense, considering that it seems to be a Mars Volta side project. I made a note in my iPod to check them out when I got home and consider a purchase, but then I saw that they were selling their album, Our Delicate Stranded Nightmare, for $10, so I thought " What the heck?" and I put down a Hamilton. What a mistake. I really should have taken some time to listen to them online first, because, and I’ve only made it through about eight tracks, but none of the complex rock guitars with drums I was hearing on stage seems to be on the disc. Instead I’ve got what initially seems like an hour of vaguely creepy-sounding ambient music, which would be fantastic if I had a haunted house, but seems pretty useless to me now. I’ll continue to give the disc a listen, but it hasn’t made a strong impression so far. ...

Last Friday I went out to Towson to see one of my favorite bands, Streetlight Manifesto. The last (and only) ska show I’d ever been to was back in 2003 for Five Iron Frenzy’s farewell tour, which primarily means that I didn’t really go to a ska show. You see, FIF skewed mostly to a Christian audience and so at their shows they mostly discouraged the shoving and pushing endemic of most ska concerts. Naturally, SLM had no such qualms about the shoving, so I got firsthand knowledge of just how hard it is to jump/dance, sing, try and stay on two feet in all the shoving, and, most importantly, breathe. Other than all the unnecessary shoving (I get why, it’s all the energy, but it just seems kind of pointless…maybe I’m just old?), the venue was my kind of place. The last show I went to was at the DAR Constitution Hall (that’s Daughters of the American Revolution for the uninformed), which was a huge venue that meant that we had assigned seats that we were mostly confined to. Now, I was mostly turned off by Ben Folds’ all-new stuff set that night, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t want to be out in a crowd for it too. The Recher Theatre, on the other hand, was a tiny venue, with capacity for maybe 1000 people, if you stretched the limits of the place and maybe ignored a fire code or two. Perfect for a rock show, although I do also like the setup they had at school for Slope Day for the same kind of show. ...