Howard Wyman
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
It Shows: Live Shows Review
Chores / Browntown West
January 24 at Thee Parkside, SF, CA
Chores is a brand new, good ol’ steady rockin’ ’90s-style indie band from Portland, OR, that somehow got lumped onto a “covers night” bill at Thee Parkside for their first show in San Francisco. As such, the scrappy newcomers dutifully opened with an Alice Cooper cover, “Go to Hell”, before rolling into their own material, which included a bunch of songs off their debut record, Life is Hard. Tucked separately into the set were two parts of their “suburban trilogy”: “Super Car”, and the appropriately frenetic “Shopping”, and though it was a shame the headliner didn’t show (San Diego soul/blues band Lady Dottie and the Diamonds), their absence did thankfully allow for an extended Chores rockfest. Earlier, Browntown West’s supporting set was rife with covers ranging from Deep Purple to Van Halen, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, it turns out BW is made up of three of the four former rockers in Zen Guerilla. The Jon Spencer-esque blues/grunge foursome moved to SF from Delaware in the mid-’90s, climbed (distribution-wise) from Alternative Tentacles to Sub Pop, toured a shitload, and disbanded in the early ’00s. Three of them now apparently play ’70s and ’80s rock covers as Browntown West for the sheer, unadulterated hell of it (with SF girl-rock singer Christa Dibiase in place of distinguished ZG original Marcus Duvall). I guess that explains why Jello Biafra was allegedly hangin’ amongst the crowd that night. Zen Guerilla it was not, but it was good times, and it kinda made sense in that Chores currently makes the kind of music a pre-Warner Sub Pop might happily have pressed, if not Merge or Matador back in the day. Yeah, I know, the ZG Sub Pop albums were well post-Warner buyout, but whatever. The point is, hopefully we’ll hear more from Chores soon.