Jill's POPPED! Diary for Tuesday, April 10

Band I Caught: Barking Spiders

Venue: The Avant Gentlemen's Lodge

I'd never been to the Avant Gentlemen's Lodge before last night. I assume that most people haven't, either. So here's a tip: bring earplugs. I didn't, but the good folks at POPPED! had a bunch at the door, and I'm glad. Because the space is loud. Low ceilings + concrete floors + makeshift sound system = a few decibels louder than the human ear should be exposed to. Also, the space isn't heated. All that being said, though? I kinda dug the venue.

Barking Spiders
Because of the way timing worked out (I was double-booked and the POPPED! show started late), Barking Spiders was the only band I got to check out last night. Fortunately, it's fronted by my old pal Mike (and by "old pal," I mean "dated a friend of mine") from the now-defunct This Radiant Boy, a band I always used to dig, and even once booked. Fans of TRB beware, though: Barking Spiders is neither as pop nor as polished as Mike's old band. The Barking Spiders' sound is, instead, sometimes reminiscent of the emocore I listened to in high school (yeah, I was emo for about five minutes, but I never got the haircut), but more often reminiscent of, believe it or not, Guns N' Roses or even early-career Offspring.

That doesn't make it a bad thing. Barking Spiders were actually a lot of fun to watch—probably because it was so obvious that they were having a lot of fun while they played. Even if I wasn't always mad about what they were playing, I certainly didn't mind watching them play it. And laughing when it appeared that, in their quest to behave like hipsters in hair bands, they might fall over onstage. I'm classy like that.