Mike Watt and the Secondmen & Burning Brides

You gotta love a power trio. There's something animalistic about trimming the fat off a band and scaling it down to its bare essentials - a rhythm section and an extra instrument to add the color. With a power trio, there's no room to hide your errors, leaving little ground between disaster and all balls out rockin'. Tuesday's show at The Brickworks showed nothing but the latter.
Philadelphia's Burning Brides kicked off the performance with a blistering set of relentless rock fury, reminding the audience of how rock 'n' roll should be played; without any apologies. Drummer Jason Kourkounis' solid floor tom beats, cymbal cracking punctuations and perfect time melded with Melanie Campbell's thick root-bass lines, forming an unbreakable metric force. This proved to be the essential component of Burning Brides' electrified sound. Singer / guitarist Dimitri Coats, clad in blue jeans and an Apes T-shirt, broke out the catalog of quintessential rock stage moves, banging his head and gesturing to the audience with his pick hand between strums of his solid body Danelectro guitar. His Orange amp head, Marshall stack and Big Muff distortion created a thunderbolt of sound, a stocky barrage of power chords and blues licks that left that all-too-familiar ringing in the ears. Their tunes were in the vein of Bleach-era Nirvana and revivalist rock, with an occasional metallic riff thrown into mix. I'd definitely see them again, but wouldn't make the mistake of forgetting my earplugs.
During The Synthesis' interview with Mike Watt, he pledged that he'd give it his all. He did not back down on that promise. The band's conviction and commitment to their songs was impressive. Mike Watt and The Secondmen (or the Jom and Terry show, as Watt called them) may have been playing their 56th gig of their Our Oars Became Wings Tour, but you couldn't tell that from the way they were kicking out the jams. Again, rock 'n' roll the way it should be played. Their songs were a decoupage of gritty cow punk, furiously picked surf rock, Primus funk-inspired jams and an occasional delicate ballad. Fellow ethnomusicologist and Synthesis writer Mark Woodruff described Watt's bass tone as "raunchy." I couldn't agree more. His Gibson "thud staff" and towering bass rig smashed a stout path through the hall while guitarist Tom Watson cleaved jagged lines with his biting Fender Telecaster. Within the songs, the peaks were magnified by restrained and tense valleys, care of Jerry Trebotric's captivating and dynamic drumming.
Watt and company performed their manic and determined songs with the seriousness of driving a three-tanker truck filled with petroleum, Vaseline and squeaky rubber toys around a steep and narrow bend - a potent mixture of dedicated insanity. The show had some irregularities: a humorous piss break ("That's show biz," retorted Watson) and occasional patches of sloppiness, but these all seemed to add to the heart and soul of the show. After the obligatory stage departure, Watt dedicated their encore to "…everybody who's been picked on at school, at the frat bar, at the alternative bar, or whatever," told us to "go start a band," and left the stage shouting, "John Coltrane." An excellent show.
- Maurice S. Teilmann
- Photos by Jeff Shaner

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