Show Pics: The Horrors @ The Parish

The Parish hosted the Horrors last Wednesday night. It was a lovely way to break the ACL hangover. It takes a few days to get over the festival mentality. You have a craving for tall, expensive cans of beer. You constantly check a schedule. You complain about cell service.

What better way to break the cycle than go see a band in a dark, smallish club atmosphere with expensive bottles of beer? Here are pics and few impressions from The Horrors set at The Parish, The Stepkids opened.

The Stepkids are a psych, funk, soul review based out of Connecticut. They brought a projector and wooed the crowd with songs that spanned full on blues rock to psych noise. They are fun. They pass vocal duties around. They like to perform. They smile a lot. Bit of an odd opener for The Horrors. They have a full length due on Stones Throw soon.

It gets dark after the stage hands do their thing. The Horrors come out and get under way with noise and guitar, “The Changing Rain” from Skying got things going. “Who Can Say” from Primary Colors followed. It was a solid one-two from the albums that deserved the attention they got. In fact, the entire set was based on the last two albums, alternating from older to newer.

“Scarlet Fields” – Loved it. “Still Life”, as expected, was the crowd favorite and was the regular set closer. The encore was “Mirror’s Image” with “moving Further Away” as the finale. It was a grand one, longest song of the night, a natural fight to let the band do what they do best, lay down a dark, trance-inducing groove.

My only complaint, bit of a quick set. The only real crowd interaction was expressing happiness at playing at a place in Austin that has a roof. About an hour, all said. In fact, I walked in at 8:30, The Stepkids were already on and in a groove. Don’t get me wrong, my body still needed an early night to complete ACL’s hangover, but I could have done with a little more…

More pics available over at the photo site…