Trash Bar 3/27 (Tuesday) & 3/29 (Thursday) Show Review
Circa 8:00 on a Tuesday night there was a smell of the Sunset Strip in Williamsburg, Brooklyn because Los Angeles band Open Hand has just arrived, Open Hand (Trustkill Records) had a pretty decent show on March 3/27 with three other unknown bands playing along the other time slots. It was a bit of a cold night and the Trash Bar was reasonably crammed in with people considering the fact that it was a Tuesday night. I had a pretty interesting conversation with a few friends of mine while waiting around for Open Hand to set up their equipment, it turns out that these friends of mine where fans of Open Hand… old Open Hand I should say, when it comes up to listening to Open Hand these friends of mine are a bit outdated, it is true that over the years the sound of Open Hand has changed. Now with a more easy going sound they seem to support the California beach music scene vibe with their latest record “You and Me”, which by the way my friends do not support. They were a little surprised that the latest album that they are not a fan of was released back in February of 2005. Open Hand has written some new songs which they performed and they are also available on Open Hand’s Myspace site, but they have yet to give out any information about releasing a new record. When Open Hand hopped on stage after setting up they did a long guitar intro going into the beginning of “Hard Night” which was pretty impressive everyone seemed to be into it, after their opening song it wasn’t so smooth though, in turns out that there was suppose to be a transition between the song “Hard Night” into another song but it was abruptly stopped due to a technical issue with the drummer needing a replacement bass drum pedal, which was quickly scooped up from the house equipment. Besides that little mishap the rest of the show went fairly good. 95 percent of the songs they played were from the latest album “You and Me”; they only played one of their new songs which are available to listen to on their Myspace site (www.myspace.com/openhand). Overall it was a satisfying show; it was pretty exciting to see Open Hand perform in general with their liveliness on stage with male and female singers and very supportive fans.
Moving on to Thursdays show (3/29) let me start off with this Near Forever update: because of some inside issues with Near Forever they dropped out of the line-up about a week before the March 29th show they were scheduled to play, so in-turn Purchase, New York band Planeside snagged up the 8:45 timeslot. Planeside is a three piece band signed to Indie label Exotic/Surreal Records who did quite a good job for a “last minute fill in”. According to Mike Vignola guitarist of Near Forever; the band wasn’t ready for the show and he wants to make a good impression for their 2007 comeback. In other words they need more work before they hit the stage again since it has been about 4-5 months before they played their last show. Near Forever currently does not have any shows lined up as of yet and will be working through some rehearsals and maybe some changes before they get back on to the band’-wagon. On the other hand scheduled Headlining band Millsted became no shows with out calling, texting or contacting anyone, including the head of Sub Rosa Party and Sneakthief singer Tony. There were quite a few people who showed up just to see Millsted play their set, and a lot of people including some other band members were pretty disappointed, it seems the Tony of Sub Rosa was also disappointed. It turns out the reason why Millsted became no shows that night is because 4 of the band members were arrested for unknown reasons, they sent out a bulletin on Myspace apologizing to the people that showed up to see them and they also apologized to Sub Rosa founder Tony and vaguely explained the reasons for them not appearing without a trace.
In a nutshell that was the Trash Bar report for the end of March...
Be sure to go out, have fun, be drunk, buy albums and check out your local music scene-Jason Franquiz
