Seattle Weekly’s Reverb Festival recently took over Ballard and as usual the day-long event was an excellent display of some of the best talent Seattle’s music scene has to offer.
Also as usual, I was there and I tweeted my thoughts on what I saw while stumbling through Ballard’s many fine bars and nightclubs and stumbling upon some pretty great local bands. So here are my tweets from Reverb along with a little bit of commentary for context.
I arrived at Reverb shortly after 6 p.m. fresh off a hard day of work at the good ol day job and I was ready for a night filled with beer, bands, and booze in Ballard. If you follow my Twitter feed you know that I am a fan of Manny’s Pale Ale. Typically a pint of Manny’s cost around $4 or $5, so I was a bit surprised at what I paid for a 12 oz cup of Manny’s when I bellied up to the bar at the Tractor. But the cost definitely didn’t stop me from imbibing.
I should mention that when I arrived at the Tractor The Cops were on stage and The Cops make for damn good drinking music. They played some new tunes off an upcoming album and in standard Cops fashion the songs were loud, rowdy garage rock romps.
In a pure genius stroke of programming Don’t Talk to the Cops followed The Cops at the Tractor. DTTTC is a group that’s been on my radar for a while but Reverb was my first time seeing them live. How good were they? I think this tweet sums thing up:
Two beers in and I had already discovered my new favorite local hip-hop group. Not only was Don’t Talk to the Cops’ set a sign that it was going to be a good Reverb experience it was also a sign that I should’ve listened to my good friend Chris Burlingame who has been singing the group’s praises for quite a while.
After a quick bite to eat with a colleague I returned to the Tractor (I swear I went to more venues than just the Tractor) to watch Kelli Schaefer. The last time I saw her was during the final few songs of her set opening for Wild Flag at the High Dive last year. I remember the songs I caught that night made a solid impression on me and her set at Reverb, which included the surprisingly killer flute-electric guitar combo, was even more impressive.
I managed to run into many musician friends while at Reverb and the first one of those friends I talked with was Jesse Bonn of the Maldives. Jesse is also in a band called Pipsisewah (also in the band is fellow Maldive Tim Gadbois), another group that had been on my radar for quite a while that I had yet to check out live until Reverb. Jesse described Pipseswah to me as sounding like a group of guys who grew up listening to Fugazi and Weezer trying to make music that sounds like AC/DC and Thin Lizzy. He was right.
Like most music festivals, one of the great things about Reverb is being able to experience music you might not otherwise voluntarily encounter. That’s what happened when I walked by Volterra.
Since Don’t Talk to the Cops was such a highlight of my Reverb experience I decided to end the night by dropping by the Sunset to see DTTC’s cousin band, and friends of Guerrilla Candy, Mash Hall. The two groups share styles and members but they make different music. This brought me to my final tweet of Reverb 2011.
