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.

Danielson, Karl Blau and Shannon Stephens at the Vera Project 4-7-11

I had a meeting Thursday at the Vera Project (related to getting into Sasquatch Fest free, but that's another story) and I was able to stay afterward to check out the show and saw some fascinating performances.

First up was Shannon Stephens singing and playing acoustic guitar with a bass and drums.

She had a sweet beautiful voice and a fairly direct and simple approach in her songs, very appealing.

I guess I'd call this pop music, but I'm not that good at categories and I don't really care much either, good music is appealing and the labels don't matter. Nice opening act, the audience was appreciative.

Next up was Karl Blau and he had a much more wacky approach. He brought up a fairly large group with multiple odd one of a kind stringed instruments, mostly or all single strings as far as I could tell. He asked if someone wanted to do interpretive dance and a young woman volunteered and jumped up on stage, she's the one in the orange shirt towards the middle in the video.

The vocal approach was different, it looks like someone is reading lyrics off of a smart phone and whispering the to the vocalist (who was someone other than Karl) who then sings it. Odd approach, but it had it's charms.

After a few numbers like this he switched to a solo approach with an electric guitar.

He played quite a few songs, talented guy. Check out the size of his hands on the guitar - he has quite a reach, makes it easy to bar chords and so on. Fun set, the odd earlier approach and then his solo stuff made for an interesting contrast.

Next up was Danielson, the headliner. The band had an interesting visual approach, wearing some sort of uniforms with various odds and ends stitched on, triangular flags with eyes on them - different and appealing in an odd way, not sure what it meant but it caught your eye.

They also had music stands with music for several band members. Given the fairly complex parts, interwoven beats, and multiple vocal parts it's not surprising, this is a sort of effortlessly intricate musical approach.

Here's some video from one of their songs:

So we had an interesting range from a fairly simple stripped down singer songwriter approach to an odd set of wacky instruments and the strangest vocal delivery method I've ever seen, then a single electric guitar with singing approach from the second performer, to an oddly visualized and realized set that was quite different yet consistent to some internal vision that I can only barely grasp - and the music was really fascinating throughout.

Cool stuff, definitely need to keep an eye out for more of these bands, I don't think any are local (not sure) so I may not get too many opportunities to catch them again, but you never know with the bigger festivals like Bumbershoot, maybe I'll get lucky...

Craft Spells, Soft Moon and Witch Gardens at the Vera Project 4-3-11

I ended up steering and lead front door at this show since we were a little short on volunteers, which made it a little challenging to get into the venue and take pictures and videos - too much work to do. I managed to get a few, though.

I dragged my 13 year old son along to help out, he sold concessions and was a good sport about it. He's on spring break, so he probably enjoyed the diversion, but it can get a little boring having to stay behind the concessions counter for several hours.


Pre-sales were low, but plenty of people showed up once the door was open, so we ended up with a reasonable crowd.

First up was Witch Gardens. Somewhat unusual instrumentation - they used a bass, guitar, zither/autoharp, and a stand-up drummer.

They got a good rollicking sound, pretty full, and they did interesting things with tempo. The first video I recorded includes a section where they slow it way down:

...and this other video includes a section where they speed it up quite a bit:

The first one was good, the second was even better, the increasing rhythm was fun. I generally enjoy good tempo changes when they work out, they add quite a bit of interest to the songs for me. The band has to be on their toes, but Witch Gardens handled it well.

Next up was Soft Moon. Soft Moon used some interesting black and white video projections over the band and the walls as they played. That combined with their distorted and atmospheric sound gave them an excellent spacey feel, sort of a miniature Pink Floyd effect (coming from me that's a compliment, I love Pink Floyd).
The pictures don't really do justice to the show, for example this one is interesting:

...but the videos are way better, you can see the moving effects:

Soft Moon used a guitar, bass, keyboards, and a sequenced drum, no live drummer. This video is a little rougher, but I like the effects and the sound. The video is too short to get to any more normal song structure, but most of their songs did resolve to a slightly more conventional approach eventually. Slightly.


The headliners were Craft Spells. They played with a more common double guitar, bass and drummer lineup and were a lot of fun. I took pictures from the balcony, which was problematic. Either I used the flash and got dim pictures with the demon eyes effect like this:

...or I left the flash off and got brighter, more colorful pictures that were blurred like this:

Unfortunately my better digital SLR (which does this way better) was out of commission. The videos worked out OK, though.

They played pretty accessible upbeat rock, and they got the audience into it a bit.

That's actually a pretty lively crowd for an indie band at the Vera Project. I wish I had time to record more songs and longer chunks of songs, but at least you can get a bit of a feel for their performance from the short videos.

I just noticed that Brooklyn Vegan has links to several of Craft Spells songs posted, check that out if you want to hear them. Even better, bookmat has a way to embed some of them on my blog:
Read full review of Idle Labor - CRAFT SPELLS on Boomkat.com © Oh, I see, clicking on it just takes you back to bookmat's blog, where you can listen to them.

All three bands had names that made me think of withcraff/wiccan themes, especially when you look at them together. I didn't really notice if they echoed those themes in their music and lyrics, as I didn't get to listen and watch to all that much of their performances so I'm not sure if it was that much of a theme overall.

The variety of approaches and sounds was interesting, from the different approach of Witch Gardens with their slightly different instrumentation and tempo changes to the spacey music and cool effects of Soft Moon to the more straightforward well crafted rock of Craft Spells - an interesting variety of approaches and another fun evening listening to music at the Vera Project. Not bad for a cold wet and windy Sunday early Spring evening in Seattle.