crazy & the brains

So I'd been seeing these posters plastered everywhere around my neighborhood over the past few days. Most of the time the various forms of self-promotion running rampant through this city go completely unnoticed, lost in a sea of millions of other people's projects, but these particular flyers were different. Mainly because they were awesome, and clearly DIY, and they looked like this:

I love those hand-drawn, chicken-scrawled, Sharpie'd punk show flyers from the '80s - basically, if it looks like it was done by an ADD-afflicted, snot-nosed fifteen year old hibernating in his parents' basement-turned-personal porno-den then I'll probably like how it looks. And that's exactly what these flyers looked like!

So I actually stopped to read them, and they turned out to be publicizing a video release party/concert by a band called Crazy & the Brains. Then I looked them up, and guess what? They're a FOLK PUNK BAND! It was like the pagan gods of cheap concerts, hybrid underground musical genres, and DIY poster art (because all of those gods do, in fact, exist) conspired to work exactly in my favor. It's pretty hard to find folk punk concerts in New York, because most of the bands are based in Bloomington and Gainesville and Lansing and other tertiary (eh, quaternary) cities of that ilk, so needless to say I immediately and adamantly dragged my trusty roommates to the show, this past Saturday at Webster Hall.

Luckily it turns out that Crazy & the Brains is GREAT, due in no small part to their energetic xylophonist and a cute frontman who's got those obnoxious mannerisms - the errant twitches, the cutesy snarls, the get-the-fuck-out-of-my-room-eye-rolls - vaguely reminiscent of Billie Joe Armstrong circa Sweet Children, pre-Green Day, when he actually was the snot-nosed fifteen year old of my poster-making dreams rather than a 35-year old just pretending to be. 

The live show was more reminiscent of Sweet Children musically, too, than, say, the straight-up acoustic guitar and stand-up bass folk-punk of the scene's mainstay Andrew Jackson Jihad. It was a bit like a combo of the Black Lips' dirtied-up doo-wop and Wavves' crunchy stonerwave pop - but with a hint, of course, of that classic folk punk weirdness. (The singer/guitarist wore a sailor cap, an ink-splattered suit and a string of twinkle lights around his shoulders. So dapper.) (And also, the xylophone.) Though on their albums (you can buy and download them here), and in the video below, they've got a clearer folk punk sound and sensibility.

Anyway, the moral of the story is, read the flyers around the city! They can turn out to be kinda cool, maybe, sometimes. Actually the moral of the story is that xylophones are sadly underused. 

Here's the video that was released for their song "Let Me Go."