Brite Futures, Los Gentlemen and Unibroz at the Vera Project 4-8-11

After yet another Vera Project meeting on Friday (getting ready for next week's member meeting) I stayed late and caught another excellent show headlined by Brite Futures. I saw them perform as Natalie Portman's Shaved Head (love the name!) in 2007 at the EMP's Sound Off battle of the bands contest and they were instantly likeable - bouncy dance pop, cute young kids having a great time on stage, I still remember that show fondly. Here's their video for Sophisticated Side Ponytail - pure pop genius! They did this song back in 2007 an dI swear none of them could've been older than 17. Since then they've renamed themselves Brite Futures and now they're playing SXSW and headlining packed shows at the Vera Project - it's nice to see talent get rewarded!

The first band to take the stage was a hip-hop outfit called Unibroz - a funny play on bros as in brothers and uni-brows as in needing to pluck your eye brows. This photo is pretty good except that I managed to leave one of the members out of the frame:

You can see all three members in this photo, although I don't like the picture as well:

Some day I'll get better at framing my shots, meanwhile you'll just have to muddle along with my best efforts...

I managed to get most of their title song - Unibroz (they were helpful enough to spell it out for me), it opens with "Thought you could pluck it but it just grows back..."

Hilarious overloading of terms and concepts in this one, witty stuff, quite amusing.

Next up was Los Gentlemen, three young dudes in a power trio lineup (guitar, bass and drums). I recognized several covers from the Cure and REM, not sure if they did originals or just some obscure covers mixed in. They obviously liked the material and did a good job with it, I particularly enjoyed the bassist, although maybe that's just because I was closer to him.


They did fun fast covers of alternative songs from the nineties which is a good source from my point of view, so I quite enjoyed it. Here's a cover of REM's Radio Free Europe:

Talented performers, although they'll most likely need to move to either their own material or more obscure covers if they want to get very far in today's music business. Strange how a few bands like the Beattles being so good at writing their own material caused things to change so much that the majority of rock musicians play their own material, and almost every rock performer aspires to doing so. It wasn't always that way!

Finally Brite Futures took the stage and the crowd just ate it up.


Song after song worked well with the crowd dancing and bouncing to the beat, wonderful positive energy and the band clearly getting off on the audience.


Just one big happy rocking out dance party.


Brite Futures is brilliantly fun and they have amazing pop chops. Their song "Sophisticated Side Ponytail" is an all-time classic, and their video for it is wonderful too. The bit with Shamu rising up from a google earth looking back drop to swallow the band - wow!

Unfortunately I had to leave early to catch the last bus home or I would've filmed more of the show. Too bad! A great way to spend a Friday night, Brite Futures always puts on a show worth seeing.