Darkness and void

All right, I was planning to go to Cafe DeKcuf to see Rich Aucoin and company, both to provide something different from the rock'n'soul I'll be seeing tonight at Babylon, courtesy of King Khan and His Sensational Shrines and because taking photographs in the Royal Oak is a pain thanks to its dark environs. Then I got to watching Master of the Flying Guillotine, and you know how time flies when heads roll. To make a long story a little less long, I walked over to The Royal Oak on Bank St. to catch what I thought was going to be an evening of electropunkery, a la Lost Sounds. Not so!

Openers Endanged Ape may have a Moog on hand, but the Lethbridge, Alta., sextet are closer to an outfit like Simply Saucer or Joy Division (and I'm not the first person to have made the comparison, apparently). They have a lively, shirt-shedding singer too, who had fun racing around the room giving high fives, jumping on stuff and falling down. There was some enthusiastic crowd dancing - a little too enthusiastic in the case of the guy who lost his cellphone and ID.


Endangered Ape, Royal Oak, May 7, 2009

I'm not going to say that Montreal's O Voids sound a huge amount like The Urinals or Flipper, but there's a certain similarity to the aesthetic impulse of those two combos in their yowly punk blurt. They've garnered some art-punk comparisons to Wire and Mission of Burma, and I immediately thought they should play with The Suppositories if they ever come back through town.


O Voids, Royal Oak, May 7, 2009

The Hot Blood Bombers capped the evening with a sizzling set of loud, fuzzy and bluesy hard rock. They made me think of combos like Australia's Powder Monkeys and played the MC5's Ramblin' Rose as their penultimate tune before finishing off with some ramalama blues.


Hot Blood Bombers, Royal Oak, May 7, 2009

The whole lot is performing in Montreal tonight at Squalor along with Ottawa's own Sedatives.

• Show reminder: As mentioned earlier, King Khan & The Shrines are hitting Babylon tonight, along with Khan kohort Mark Sultan and The Sunday Sinners; Death In Custody, Disco Assault, The Rookers, The Botched Suicides and Vanier Shank punk rock at Cafe Dekcuf; there's more punk rock down below with SNFU, Ab Irato, Snatchback, Hands of The Few and Chachi on Acid; Former High Dialer Rishi Dhir brings his psych'n'sitars outfit Elephant Stone to Zaphod's with Death of Apollo and Urban Aesthetics;