I Learned Something Last Summer

Lest our meager readership begin to think that I focus exclusively on defunct bands, allow me to share a story from a few months back: I had just returned from a rocky month-long tour of the lower forty-eight. My neighbor and sometime artistic collaborator, Colin Frangos, informed me that he'd intercepted a Minneapolis band attempting to bypass the Bay Area on their way from Portland to Los Angeles and had booked them a night in San Franciso. Now, the last thing I wanted to do after 32 days of rock shows was go to a rock show, but Colin insisted that I witness this midwestern dynamo, so I dragged my rock-fatigued ass out to see The Blind Shake.

The closely-shorn trio played a hobbled set that night -- a missing baritone guitar forced one of them to play a borrowed bass and transpose notes -- but, gear quagmires notwithstanding, The Blind Shake brought a vibe that might be best described as equal parts prehistoric and futuristic. Impressed, I walked that night with two LPs, including their 2007 release, "Carmel":

Go buy this record.

Being a self-professed purveyor of succinct band descriptions and having gone on long enough with this treatise, I will now indulge my propensity for pithiness: this record is an unholy mixture of Hammerhead, Link Wray, and Devo. This description may be shamelessly reliant upon a knowledge of American outsider rock, but, if you get my meaning, you grasp the weight of my claim.

If you don't get my meaning, I nonetheless heartily encourage you to check out The Blind Shake and, if you like what you hear, work backwards from there. After all, if you're reading this, you're probably broken -- your rock should be broken, too.