The Grooms (with Tempo no Tempo and Young Prisms)
December 15th at Hemlock Tavern, San Francisco

The Hemlock in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco is good for many things. Smaller bands play in the back room for seven bucks, there’s a circular bar so there’s plenty of places to post up for a pint, and there’s a smoking room, which is literally a room within the bar with glass walls to see out of. It’s all pretty great, I certainly couldn’t as for much more. But the one thing that isn’t so great about the Hemlock is the sound. No bueno.

In particular, the bad sound system did not bode well for five-piece San Francisco collective Young Prisms. On their five-song self-titled EP, they sound pretty cool. Certainly a bit derivative of the whole psych/garage rock/beachy thing happening these days, but certainly not be discounted either as on record there’s enough color there. However, with a strange sound system like the Hemlock’s, it was actually hard to tell if they wanted that far away sound or not. In the end, it sounded detrimentally far away and that didn’t translate well for the audience. Also, some of the members seemed downright bored, coming off too cool for the whole thing, which sometimes, I’ll just say it, is goddamn irritating.

The Grooms (from Brooklyn) were up next, and they were the band I was there to see. Following them since 2007 when they were called the Muggabears and self-released Night Choreography, which ended up at #7 on my Top Ten list that year, I’ve watched the band go through line-up changes, a name change, and higher production quality on this year’s Rejoicer, which has transformed their Sonic Youth-meets-Pavement fuzzy stabs into an elevated state with just the right amount of refinement of those pronounced elements that made their debut under the Muggabears moniker so affecting. Full of guitar stabs and blasts of noise and surprising moments in which they embrace silence and cryptic lyrics without abandoning a melodic sensibility that’s threaded throughout… it’s just all there for me. Frontman Travis Johnson, whose got a distinctive voice, brings the goods in a live environment as well, thrashing around and beating his guitar like he’s extracting certain sounds out of it and then cramming them back in for submission. It’s a sight to see. The new drummer, Jim Sykes, is nothing to sneeze at, and bassist Emily Ambruso can work the fret board to extract that dark, quirky undertone. Whatever it is this band is doing, it’s a certain something that’s lackin’ these days and that’s just really fucking refreshing.

Tempo No Tempo was up next. But I was in the smoking lounge for most of it, because that’s what friends are for. I can’t say I’m super stoked on Tempo No Tempo’s songs (the three I heard on MySpace anyway) as they angle for this Q and Not U thing from an album of theirs of which I was not terribly fond, and Q and Not U have much better lyrics, but in a live environment I’m sure Tempo No Tempo do well for their ability to get some asses moving with the whole sense of dance-punk urgency that’s happening in their songs. I walked into the room for the last two songs, and no one was dancing or anything, but most folks seemed happy.

Listen: Grooms, Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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