At the free AHA festival at the Santa Fe Railyard last Sunday, I discovered that Santa Fe has a first-rate post-punk rock band, Venus Bogardus, originally formed in Bath, England in 2005. The band includes James Reich, guitar and vocals, and Hannah Levbarg, bass and vocals. They seem to usually play in a trio, with different drummers over the years...the current drummer seems to be Luke Carr. They played with an excellent taped drum track on the stage at El Museo Cultural, a very tight, energetic but not overbearing (and not too loud!) set with plenty of excellent songwriting---e.g. their opener, Research---in evidence. Their sound and songs reminded me at times of Sonic Youth and the Minutemen---and it turns out they opened for Mike Watt and the Missingmen in 2009. They have several albums out, but they played quite a few new songs. Hard for me to see why a band this good hasn't made it bigger yet---their songs, while definitely punk-influenced, are often very catchy, and have plenty of interesting structure and variety. Perhaps the lyrics are a bit arty, abstruse, and/or political for mainstream popularity. One of the recently written songs' chorus goes "We got the politics, we got the politics, we got the gender politics". One of their shoutier, more repetitive songs (I think it has basically two sections, a verse and a chorus, each of which is rather simple, just a few repeated measures), but still catchy. Then again, I guess I rarely (to a first approximation, never) hear even the catchiest stuff from Sonic Youth or the Minutemen on the radio....but Sonic Youth and Mike Watt both appear to be able to keep going. So hopefully there's a way for a band this good to survive without the blessing of Clearchannel et. al.
Unfortunately no-one in the audience of 40 or 50 at the Museo was dancing, though there was plenty of room up on stage and about eight young fans were sitting or standing there nodding lightly to the music. It really begs for some dancing, or at least more vigorous head-nodding. Pogo, anyone?
Venusbogardus.com has lots of info and (on the homepage blog) free downloads of three live "bootleg" tracks from a Santa Fe Brewing Company performance, of which my favorite is Permanent Notice. For more listening (and more up to date concert info) you need to visit their Myspace page, where you can listen to five tracks, including the excellent Spitting at the Glass and Judy Davis Lips from their latest CD, Spitting at the Glass.
Here's a player (from their page at Bandcamp.com) with all the tracks from the CD:
Judy Davis Lips shows the Sonic Youth similarities clearly go a lot further than "post punk band with a female bassist"... the intro, with its chiming, oddly-tuned guitars sounds like classic SY, rhythmically too, and the song itself definitely resembles SY's catchier, poppier aspect, though you could perhaps hear some Dead Kennedys in the verse. But you can't tell me the voiceover starting at 2'20 was not inspired by Kim Gordon. The modulation, relaxing into a cushion of harmony, into the chorus is exemplifies their songwriting skill. But chasing influences isn't the main point---whatever their influences, they have their own sound, and do their own thing very well---as the quirky but very catchy song Spitting at the Glass illustrates.
For more music, you can listen to (and purchase) three of their albums at bandcamp.com.
If you don't mind really bad fidelity, this gives an idea what they're currently like live:
Venus Bogardus, "Jacques Rigaut", live at the Atomic Cantina, Albuquerque