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.
...