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Out
Drill teams
BY WILL SPITZ
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A mere four shows into their latest tour, Pedro the Lion were already weathering their second fire alarm. In the midst of their marathon set last Thursday at the Middle East, someone tripped a false alarm next door at ZuZu — but owing to the close proximity of clubs in the immediate area, the Middle East upstairs and downstairs and T.T. the Bear’s Place emptied just to be sure. PTL treated the disruption as a mere intermission, but upon returning to the stage, brand-new keyboardist James McAlister discovered something was missing — it seemed someone had mistaken his detailed crib sheet for a set list and nabbed it as a souvenir. Yet when the show resumed, the thief was conscientious enough to pass the notes to the stage. The alarm caused less fuss at T.T. the Bear’s Place, where the Unbusted had just come off stage. As the Halogens resumed the night’s entertainment, Unbusted singer/guitarist Joe Keefe and his older, more accomplished girlfriend, Juliana Hatfield, set off fireworks by making kissy-face at the bar while Max Heinegg, who had opened the show, explained the mystery of belly shots to the husband-and-wife team of Steve Crotty (AM Stereo) and Lauran O’Neal (Cheater Pint). The headliners, Helicopter Helicopter, were making their first local appearance since moving to LA, where they’ve been supporting themselves by testing video games, bartending, and sitting in the studio audience for sit-com pilots. (Beverly Hills SUV starring Henry Winkler was a particularly memorable one.) They opened their set with "Work Is the Hammer," an ode to the Office Space proletariat that’s slated as a single off their next album. By Sunday afternoon, though, standing in an unoccupied office-space-turned video-shoot-location in Kendall Square, singer/guitarist Chris Zerby was damn near sick of it: "If I never hear this song again, it’d be too soon," he joked as the song’s bridge played for the umpteenth time. H2 had spent the weekend shooting a video for "Work" with Emerson College’s student-run, school-funded organization Emerson Independent Video. The premise? Taking their cues from the song’s chorus ("Work is the hammer that beats us down"), a pack of pallid, depressed-looking office temps are roused to trash their environs by an intangible rock-and-roll feeling — with H2 playing Hobbes, as director David Kane put it, to the workers’ Calvin. It seemed like 1996 all over again last Friday night at the release party for Hellcat Records’ Give ’Em the Boot Volume 4, as recently reunited street-punk heroes the Ducky Boys reteamed with their old pals the Unseen. "It feels like we’re at the Rat," said Ducky Boys singer/bassist Mark Lind, though in any other circumstance, mistaking pristine, ClearChannel–safe Axis for the venerable, vanished punk shithole would seem a bit rash. Perhaps what made it seem that way were the kids — many of whom couldn’t have been much older than 11 or 12 when the Duckys called it quits, in 1999 — who sang along and pumped fists to older tunes like "I’ll Rise Up," from 1997’s No Getting Out, as well as to songs off the Duckys’ new Three Chords and the Truth (Thorp), which hit stores last Tuesday. Lind allowed that it was "cool to take another swing at the younger kids" and that it was fitting to be paired with the Unseen again, since they’d started out on the same bills. "I was really surprised by how the younger kids received us. I have no idea how they knew the words to the songs. Must be from the Internet or something." Will Spitz can be reached at wspitz[a]phx.com
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