Show Review: Twin Peaks @ Red 7 (6.4)

Thursday night had the ATH crew all about town taking advantage of the super packed night of shows that the city had to offer. Stop number two on my night was at Red 7 to catch Chicagoans Twin Peaks for what seems like the umpteenth time. What I got was a night of rowdy and loud, but all around rock and roll good times. Read on for some thoughts on the night.

After cutting across town from the Courtney Barnett ACL taping, I got to Red 7 just in time to catch the last song or two of Austin native, John Wesley Coleman, whose performance was exactly what you’d expect from the man. If you’ve seen this gentleman and his crew before, you know exactly what I’m talking about: the americana tunes of this act are simultaneously brought to life and decimated by his punk performance and live personae. You either love it or you hate it, or at least can’t help but laugh and rock along as he stumbles around the stage knocking into the other band members.

Up next were fellow Chicagoans and tour mates, Modern Vices who attempted to win over the growing crowd with their garagey rock music dominated by the powerfully hinging on out of control vocals of the front man Alex Rebek. Their set started out fairly strong; after the first song I was ready for more, but then song after song the band seemed to be still playing that first one and the vocals got a little grating. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t entertained, but the sound of the band lent itself to repetition and left me with the feeling that I’d seen the same song rehashed a number of times.

After these two openers, the crowd was itching for the lads of Twin Peaks to begin their set. As the band stood on the stage getting final adjustments to their stage monitors, the crowd begin to amp up, already yelling for shirts to be taken off. And then these five gentleman launched into their set with an intense amount of energy, and maintained that all through the night. With the very first song, the crowd near the front of the stage began to form a mini- semi-mosh pit, jumping and flailing their bodies about. The band members asked that members of the crowd put their phones away and just rock and roll with them, but as the night progressed the crowd seemed to forget that, to which the band attempted to reach out and confiscate said devices.

Musically, Twin Peaks were solid; they played a good number of garage punk tracks from their latest release, Wild Onion, but also threw back a few numbers from their earlier album. Even though I’d seen this band play in a few different venues, they seemed to be in a special zone last night: each member took turns throwing their entire body into the full force of the music, and the crowd seemed to feed off this and craziness ensued. At one point, a small female fan leaped up on stage to give Clay Frankel a kiss on the cheek after which he promptly drop kicked her right off the stage and back into the crowd. When running out of drinks, the band asked for a bit of help from the crowd, to which ‘Tom’ hooked it up with a round of beers. Somewhat unbelievably, Cadien James was even able to take a bit of a crowd surf despite the small number of people in the venue, all while touting his guitar and landing safely back on stage.

All in all it was an entertaining and crazy fun set from the band, and I highly doubt anyone in attendance had a bad time watching the boys of Twin Peaks do their rowdy thing.