Live Review: Goodbye Blue Monday
By: Ben Salvo
July 31, 2009
Rating: 9/11

Since the dawn of time, New Jersey has had an endless supply of noisy drunks at its disposal. On Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day and myriad other days dedicated to alcohol consumption, these boisterous, plaid-shorted apes migrate northeast to Manhattan and Brooklyn with their crude halter-topped mates to empty mugs of Bud Light Lime, eat Buffalo wings and puke on the sidewalks. Do these creatures have anything positive to offer our fair boroughs? Perhaps a night of hard hitting music at a Bushwick dive can help answer this eternal question.

Kitschy, knick-knacked walls ripe with hipster cynicism housed a new breed of loud, beer guzzling Garden Staters Friday night at Goodbye Blue Monday when three NJ bands, Nice Daughter (pictured below), Killin Floor and Torrential Downpour (pictured above) took over the front and back stages and blasted their way through sets of experimental percussion, neo-prog rock and extreme noisecore.

Goodbye Blue Monday was the perfect venue for this roundup of miscreants as its junkyard, circus style décor and (usually) cover free, choose-your-own-adventure two stage lineup welcomed an extremely broad patronage. Inside, a five-spot covered a tall boy of PBR or a cup of “Good” red wine and a tip for the ambiguous bartender, and, till the bands started playing, the museum of quirk strewn throughout the place kept everyone entertained. Out back was something of a grunge nest, with turned over typewriters and a baby doll bulletin board giving off a Rob Zomie-meets-Fred G. Sanford atmosphere that I could actually taste.

We kicked off the evening inside with Nice Daughter. Made up of William Paterson University music grads Jeff Brown (drum set/glockenspiel), April McKloskey (vibraphone/synth), and Theo Metz (drum set), Nice Daughter was a percussion fan’s wet dream. Dueling drum sets accompanied a pinch of melody while electronic faux-feedback swept through each rhythmic masterpiece. A moon landing soundbyte served as a prelude to opener “Cosmic,” and the trio played through five instrumental numbers with the kind of innate charisma and unswerving confidence expected from only a veteran lead guitarist or vocalist.

The beauty of Nice Daughter was the symmetry: watching two mind-blowing drummers play face-to-face as McKloskey wielded two mallets per hand on the vibraphone (i.e. a big, sexy xylophone) and nurtured the wailing synthesizer was better than watching a tire burn.

At the end of the set, my ears were burning for more, so I floated back to the semi-outdoor stage area where Jersey/Brooklyn hybrid southern style metal band Killin Floor had already begun thrashing into its heavy, bearded playlist. Leading man Ben Zeff switched back and forth between an eight-string guitar and a low-tuned six-string as Max Sterh took the bass for a walk with Quinn Blandford’s drums. A couple songs in, Zeff addressed a section of the audience:

“This one’s for all you music nerds out there, because it’s hard and there’s a section that’s in seven, and that’s what you like,” he promised, and a chorus of gasps and snickers followed.

I stuck around for the rare time signature, but the Moby Dick of Jersey bands was about to take the stage inside: Torrential Downpour.

A self-described “entity unto itself,” Torrential Downpour were something like noise-ologists, and their mission seemed to consist of pulling the listener out of his/her comfort zone and disintegrating his/her brain with toxic reverberation. I scoffed at the two-dollar earplugs for sale at the bar, but I coughed up the dough five seconds into the set as the sting of the amplifiers laid waste to my aural perception.

Even through the chaos, these boys were able to form discernable melodies, which ran the gambit of style from spaghetti western to Tarantino soundtrack and Jonathon Davis growl-scat. Still, when vocalist/sampler Prkr forced his way through the band’s hardcore stride and insanity took over, several members of the audience began to scream at the top of their lungs, “Fuck my ears! Fuck my ears!”

A show like this usually leaves me staggering aimlessly into the street, wondering if I’ll ever regain my senses, and Friday night was no exception. I got on the wrong bus and ended up in the middle of nowhere with an angry sidewalk cat and a couple in multi-colored rave pants.