GRACIAS POR VISITAR

The Warlocks & Other L.A. Stoner Bands Rock Los Globos Brent L. Smith

Made my way to The Warlocks show from West Hollywood, a different dimension that vanishes somewhere between Highland and Cahuenga. Passing through all the nouveau ugly of Hollywood, the streets warped around the Silver Lake bend and rows of rundown dives and top tier coffee joints streamed by in the passenger window. Then the world STOPPED as my Sidecar driver braked and dumped me off on the landmark Sunset stoop of Club Los Globos, wrapped in tired boulevard neon.

The lineup was schizophrenic, featuring 10 acts not counting The Warlocks (Tashaki Miyaki, Dream Boys, Centimeters, L.A. Drones, Loto Ball, Magic Mirror, Super 78, Blood Candy, United Ghosts, and Aaron Frankel DJ) that would be split between the venue’s Round Room and Main Stage. Squinting my eyes at the set times pinned on the wall, music blogger @portinfinite immediately asked what band I was in (at the time I thought he was an angry booker who was yelling at me for being late). My response was hard to hear over the racket, so I simply saluted him with my bottle of Oculto beer and shuttled between the digital art-rock doom of Loto Ball—gracing the Round Room with lotsa skin—and the vanilla dreaminess of Dream Boys on the main stage.

Once Tashaki Miyaki came on, my attention was fixed.

Tashaki is a band that’s hypnotized me before, and in the better part of the last half decade it has established itself as a coveted L.A. darling. I first saw them play at my old job when I was bar back (and bebop floorman) at Harvard and Stone. I loved that job because a) my uniform consisted of me looking like Eyeball Chambers from Stand By Me and b) almost every night there was stellar live music featuring different local bands. I swear

to god, every single time, instead of putting in plugs and tuning out the music so I could focus on bussing cocktail glasses and mopping up vomit in the women’s stalls, I found myself fixated on the stage, headbanging, and dancing with the barfly regulars (much to the chagrin of my boss). I was spoiled. Like a fish in water, I hadn’t realized my immersion—I was at the forefront of this Neo-Psych Rock Wave that has crashed onto Hollywood’s danker eastside. A little surfer garage, a little folk pop, a little no-wave, etc. but whatever the hell it is, it’s a great fucking sound and I’m just happy I got to see it in the flesh.

Tashaki was a standout for sure. Their astral rock sound (wa-wa-driven fuzz guitar) has you peering into the cosmic infinite, as the galactic album cover of their EP suggests. And the band’s foxlike drummer/frontwoman—that is, foxy and elusive— seems to say so much with so little in minimalist drumbeats and painfully romantic lyrics.

Needless to say, the night at Los Globos was awash in distorted echoes and lullaby vocals. With all the neon retail kids preparing for Coachella, there was plenty of space on the dance floor, and the scant crowd of underground, dreamy-eyed shoegazers had room to breathe and sway.

It didn’t get rowdy until The Warlocks took the stage, flooded in red light. Like several of the bands playing that night, there is still much credit due to this gang of L.A. proto rockers. Their first blip on the radar was in 2001’s “Rise and Fall,” and fourteen years later they’ve managed to make it out of the early millennium haze of paranoia and bad pop to give Angelenos an honest, alchemized sound. Vocals themselves are rare, as the songs lend themselves to Hendrixian tangents and instrumental trances. Think The Entrance Band with added layers of blues, metal, and a little late60s pop. It wasn’t long until before the crowd began slithering in cool chaos all over each other. Aged beauty queens in giant derby hats threw confetti over the whole scene, providing comic relief as leather biker jackets kept knocking into me.

I ping-ponged back into the Round Room to catch Blood Candy’s female-driven post-punk vibes; at once melancholic and ecstatic, heavy distortion and sweet cooing, which was a nice outro to the evening (and fitting, considering, that very day, Boston declared April 9th Riot Grrrl Day in honor of Kathleen Hanna). By that point I was surprised I could still keep all the names straight. Like I said: schizo.

Thank you, Silver Lake. GRACIAS POR VISITAR.