Shook Ones, Title Fight @ Sidebar Tonight

Don’t sleep on this. Don’t. Just don’t. We don’t care if you’re tired from work. We don’t care if you want to stay home and watch the Office on TV. Or Mad Men. Or whatever the hell people watch these days. We don’t even care if you’re out of clean underwear and your baby has swine flu and you have to miss your own birthday party. (And you know who you are, Birthday Girl.)

This is Shook Ones.

The Bellingham lads are, in the Chop’s humble opinion, basically the coolest band in America at this point. If you ask around, it won’t be long until you find some jaded old has-been scenester who will try to tell you:

Oh piss piss moan moan. They just sound like Lifetime. They’re not doing anything original.

The Chop has heard a lot of those so-called ‘original’ acts lately, and they all fall flat on their faces. You with your genre-defying, your high concepts, your time signatures and pedals and exotic drums. Fuck you. This band does what you don’t… it rocks.

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We’re quite serious here. As much as we love the bands that we love, (and you need only page back through this week for examples) this is the one we’re really excited to see. This is the one that’s not at all a shadow of something else. No ex- this and former- that. This is a band that’s doing its best work right now!

When you pull up next to the Chop going up Calvert Street and say ‘Who’s that idiot and why is he bouncing around the car and screaming so much?’ Its us. And its because we’re listening to Shook Ones. Loud. By the time this band is finally done, they’re going to be more important than Lifetime. And Keep in mind, they’re from Washington State. Its gonna be a hot minute before they come back this way.

Opening up is the still relatively new PA band Title Fight, whom the Chop had a chance to see live recently at the Celebrated Summer 3 year anniversary show in Towson with Pulling Teeth and Black SS. We don’t mind telling you we were very pleasantly surprised by Title Fight, who sounds way better than any band with such a dumb name has a right to. We were expecting a third rate Stout, but were stopped in our tracks by something that reminded us more of the short lived Baltimore band A Perfect Kiss. We freaking loved APK while they were around, and yeah, sometimes we do wish we could be 19 again and listen to Saves the Day and Jimmy Eat World all day. So what?

We even bought the Title Fight CD that night, and the sound takes us back 10 years in a wholly un-contrived and non-ironic way.

Stumbling on them was also a good reminder of how we used to find out about all the new bands we liked… by seeing them live.