Tomorrow: Say Hi/The Velvet Teen/A-Sides @ The Proletariat

Crap. I really wish my Wednesday nights weren’t pretty much already spoken for, especially after finally checking out the tracks up on Say Hi’s Myspace page…

The Prolo’s got a good one tomorrow evening (10/24, for the chronologically-impaired), one I’d highly recommend checking out. I was totally unfamiliar with Seattle-bred headliners Say Hi (formerly known as “Say Hi to Your Mom,” which I kinda think is a better band moniker, but hey) ’til today, but I’m now officially blown away — the stuff they’ve got online for their not-yet-released new full-length, The Wishes and the Glitch, is freakin’ great, a cool pile of chilly-but-not-coldhearted electro-indie that brings to mind The Postal Service with a touch of Doves’ grandiose vision. Seriously, I can’t stop listening to the half-jaded kiss-off of “Northwestern Girls.”

It’s also worth mentioning that while Wishes doesn’t “officially” come out ’til Feb. of 2008, the band is, um, already done with it & all that and is offering the album to pre-ordering fans in either immediately-downloadable MP3 format or wait-’til-early-November CD format. (Go here to order; I bought the “early-November” version, but it comes w/the digital download, too, so I’ll hopefully be downloading & listening to it all after I get home tonight…)

Then there’s The Velvet Teen, who I really liked for a brief period back in 2002, when they released Out of the Fierce Parade, and who seemed to vanish into the ether not long after — which, it turns out, was totally not the case, as the band’s been releasing EPs and LPs steadily since then, even while coping with the death of founding member Logan Whitehurst of brain cancer. Man…

At any rate, they’ve slipped back onto my personal radar, at least, and now I find myself smacking myself on the head for not paying attention in the meantime. I’m still a sucker for the band’s older stuff, especially “Counting Backwards” (off 2001’s The Great Beast EP) and “The Prize Fighter” (off Out of the Fierce Parade), but I’m now finding that I also enjoy the stuff off of their “middle” albums, like “A Captive Audience” (off Elysium), which swoops and swoons nicely like Coldplay at their least arena-sappy, and “Tokyoto” and “Building a Whale” (off Cum Laude), both of which bury everything in a thick layer of Parts and Labor-esque electro-fuzz but still feature some awesomely frantic drums.

So, there you go — I’m afraid I haven’t yet checked out openers The A-Sides (sorry, guys), but what the fuck; two damn good bands is more than enough reason to check out a weeknight show, I’d say.