On This Day (2/27): Festival at the Mink
White Rhino / The Manichean / Alkari / dUNETX / The Sour Notes / Giant Battle Monster / Flowers to Hide / Gretchen Schmaltz / Covington / The Dry Season
2/27/2010; The Mink, Houston, Texas
Oh Christ, this show. This was something I was assigned to by the Houston Chronicle and it was a brutal night. It was a festival at this shitty bar called the Mink, which I don't think I was supposed to be at because I wasn't 21 yet, but press credentials will get you into a lot of shit. Actually, Roky Moon used to bartend there. Shoutouts to Roky, whose been serving me alcohol for so many years that now we're both sober and I'm buying coffee from him instead. An entire decade of alcoholism and eventual recovery spent with that guy. Love you, Roky.
Who even were these bands? This was one of the shit tier local festivals. I mean, it seemed like anybody could get on this bill if you'd been practicing in a garage for five minutes. Let's see...
Man, I remember Alkari or dUNETX, whichever one it was, were these old guys playing post-hardcore and you just knew it was never gonna happen for them. That genre was dead at the time and they were clearly spent from trying so many years to make it. You watch some rise, you watch some fall. The music business is harsh.
Gretchen Schmaltz was actually pretty good as I remember. Giant Battle Monster was a cool project, but I ended up doing some stuff with the guy while working for the Houston Press, and just... holy shit. I liked their music, but the guy clearly thought they were a much bigger, better, and more important band than they really were. His constant badgering for press coverage and long complaints about the lack thereof was exhausting.
The Manichean. Goddamn that band sucked. I'm sorry. They were friends with a lot of people in the scene, so they just automatically got praised (see: Satin Hooks). I was never friends with them, so fuck 'em. Terrible, pretentious, art school dropout shit. Just imagine The Black Parade if My Chemical Romance had no talent and no production budget. I unabashedly hated the Manichean and I don't care that the guy has a new project that everyone is falling all over themselves about playing Day for Night.
So yeah, obviously not a show I really wanted to go to. I really wish that the 29-95 archives still existed online so I could see how terrible my review of this show was. I was a bad writer at the time (still am, probably) and I couldn't give two shits about any of this, so it was a wash.