Spanish Gamble, White Wives, and Landmines
Wednesday, April 6 at Empire
Empire’s kind of a strange place to see shows; with its long, narrow shape and relatively little room for a band to set up down at one end, it can create an awkward viewing environment for anyone beyond the first couple of rows in the audience. For that reason, I always try to get to Empire shows early. When I got to this show, though, the only people hanging around were the bands and the barflies. I wasn’t sure whether I was too early, or whether no one was going to come out. Fortunately, the former turned out to be the case; a whole bunch of people with far more precise timing than me showed up in the last 5 or 10 minutes before the first band started to play, and there ended up being a decent crowd on hand for all three bands.
Spanish Gamble, White Wives, and Landmines
Wednesday, April 6 at Empire
Empire’s kind of a strange place to see shows; with its long, narrow shape and relatively little room for a band to set up down at one end, it can create an awkward viewing environment for anyone beyond the first couple of rows in the audience. For that reason, I always try to get to Empire shows early. When I got to this show, though, the only people hanging around were the bands and the barflies. I wasn’t sure whether I was too early, or whether no one was going to come out. Fortunately, the former turned out to be the case; a whole bunch of people with far more precise timing than me showed up in the last 5 or 10 minutes before the first band started to play, and there ended up being a decent crowd on hand for all three bands.
First up was Gainesville, Florida’s Spanish Gamble. They play the sort of melodic punk that Florida has been turning out in decent quantities for at least a decade now–the sort that features catchy choruses sung in gravelly voices and played with loud, distorted guitars. The influence of bands like Dillinger Four and Leatherface is most apparent in Spanish Gamble’s raw, dirty melodies and propulsive, distorted guitar riffs. All of that combined with their energetic performance led them to kick off the evening with a hell of a set. They played their songs with fire and intensity, rocking out so much that I had to be careful, from my position in the front row, not to get stabbed in the stomach by the guitar player’s headstock. Every chorus seemed equally anthemic, every new song another classic waiting to happen. I’d only heard a few songs of theirs prior to seeing them play, but was won over so completely by what I saw that I had to buy their album. Their set was especially impressive in light of the fact that their drummer was brand new to the band; the show at Empire was the third date of a three-month tour, and it was also his third show playing drums for them. I saw no rookie mistakes from him–indeed, it seemed like his playing was the driving force behind a lot of the songs they played. Maybe losing their old drummer was a blessing in disguise. Either way, Spanish Gamble left the other bands on the bill with a tough act to follow.
Pittsburgh’s White Wives played next. They’d been advertised as featuring members of Anti-Flag, but I don’t follow that band well enough to tell you which of the five members of White Wives was in both bands. I can tell you that they didn’t sound much like Anti-Flag, which is fine with me. That band isn’t terrible or anything, but they’ve never been my cup of tea, so I was glad to see such a significant difference between them and White Wives. White Wives featured three guitar players, two of which played through massive boards of effects pedals and used said pedals to give themselves very unusual guitar sounds. That said, their songwriting was still reasonably similar to that of Spanish Gamble–they also had plenty of booze-soaked melodic punk anthems to offer, though the tone of White Wives’s music was less upbeat and more elegaic than that of Spanish Gamble. They also featured some dramatic interludes in which one of the guitar players–not the main vocalist in the band, but the one with the most leader-like stage presence–would stop playing his guitar in order to attack a smaller second drum set consisting of a deep marching-band snare drum and one of those four-drum racks that some marching drummers carry. I guess maybe this guy used to play in a marching band in high school, and decided to integrate his old marching set into his current band? The marching-drum breaks didn’t always seem necessary to the music, but did serve to liven up the set. This was most true during their final song, as the guitarist abandoned his guitar halfway through in order to start pounding on his marching drums. After a few seconds of that, he dragged the marching snare over to the main drummer’s kit and set it down on top of the bass drum, knocking down the rack tom and a cymbal as he did so. The main drummer, undaunted, kept playing, and the guitarist pounded out some snare rolls for a few more seconds before finally discarding his marching snare completely and heading back to his microphone. Meanwhile, the guitarist who did most of the singing had abandoned his microphone and started literally climbing the walls of the venue, eventually perching on top of his amp and finishing the song from there. When the drummer finally brought White Wives’ set to a close, equipment was scattered everywhere, and some of the members of the band looked ready to collapse. The live performance was so dramatic that it overshadowed the actual music a bit, but the final impression I got was of an above-average band with a deep belief in themselves and what they were doing. I’m not sure their records could ever really hold up to what they delivered live, but they proved to me that as a live act, White Wives are necessary viewing.
Richmond’s own Landmines finished out the evening in fine fashion. I’ve been a fan of theirs since back when they started, but haven’t seen them play in at least a couple of years, so I was glad to get a chance to catch them again. The songs they played were mostly new to me, and I could hear a great deal of artistic development in the difference between the new material and the way they’d sounded last time I saw them. Back when they started, members of the band had told me that they wanted to combine the energy of fast hardcore with the melodies of emotionally-driven pop-punk. The material that made up the majority of their set last Wednesday seemed to do exactly that, mixing speedy tempos and energetic verses with the same sort of anthemic choruses that the other two bands on this bill dealt in. While all the bands on the bill were great, Landmines seemed to have the most original approach to the style that all of them were working in. This helped them make a positive impression on the crowd, even though they were playing after two other similar-sounding bands. Their stage show wasn’t as dramatic as White Wives’s had been, but they nonetheless moved around quite a bit, and managed to get the crowd fired up enough to inspire some booze-fueled hijinks that made me glad I was standing off to one side for most of the set. Generally, when beer gets spilled in situations like this, it gets spilled on me, and that’s always a bummer, so it was nice to avoid the alcoholic spills for once. Towards the end of their set, Landmines did a pretty excellent cover of “Jumping Someone Else’s Train,” a very early single by The Cure. It might surprise some people who are only familiar with Cure tunes like “Lovesong” and “Just Like Heaven,” but in their very early days the Cure were a pretty decent melodic punk band themselves, so the fact that a Cure cover fit so well into Landmines’ set actually made a lot of sense. In my humble opinion, it also spoke well for Landmines’ musical tastes (I realize that some of you will disagree). They ended with “Making Good On A Promise,” one of my favorite songs of theirs from back in the day when I used to go see Landmines a lot, and it got a huge reaction out of the entire crowd. Everyone in the front row was going nuts, tackling singer Paul Picillo and causing the mic to get unplugged at one point, which did nothing to stop the momentum of the song. It was a perfect way for the set and the evening to end, with a huge outpouring of sincere emotion linked to an excellent song by an awesome band. And since the show only featured three bands, it suffered from none of the problems with people leaving early that typically plague late shows. In fact, the whole thing was over by 1 AM, which was awesome. As was pretty much everything about this show, come to think of it.
