Pizza Punk Rock: The Catalyst + Golden Cities + Muhammid Ali, Tonight

UPDATE: Just a bit of a note for those who A) can’t make it up to the Heights tonight or B) want an extra dose of Richmondians The Catalyst — just got word that they’ll (hopefully) be making an appearance on the Mutant Hardcore Flower Hour on KTRU tonight, as well. Tune in tonight between, say, 10PM & midnight, and you may get a chance to hear ’em then…

All you Heights-dwellers and folks willing to actually get into the car to see a (badass) show on a weeknight, this one’s for you. The good people at Esotype Records (specifically, homeboy Lance Higdon) have set up a show tonight, Thurs., June 30th, up at Double Dave’s Pizzaworks in the Heights (the address, as you can see over there on the right, is 3322 Ella), and it sounds like it’s gonna be a cool one.

The headliners are out-of-towners The Catalyst, from VA, and they’re joined by local retro-indie-rockers Muhammid Ali and spacey/atmospheric (mostly-)instrumentalists Golden Cities. Never seen The Catalyst in person, but on record they sound like a noisy, sprawling shotgun wedding between screamo-style hardcore and backwoods stoners like Federation X or Priestess, and that’s a very cool musical place to be, trust me.

The other two bands, of course, I dig the hell out of, although I still desperately need to find a copy of an actual Muhammid Ali release, sadly…argh. Live, they can be kind of a mess, but they channel late-’90s indie-rock like few others can and pull it off with a big don’t-give-a-fuck middle finger flying high. The Cities folks, for their part, conjure up some awesomely menacing, foreboding clouds of sound, coming off like a murkier, less-mopey Explosions in the Sky (whom I like quite a bit, I should note). This promises to be a collision of sound the likes of which Double Dave’s has never experienced, y’all.

Details: like it says over to the right, the show’ll run early, from 7-10PM, and there’s a suggested “donation” of $5 so The Catalyst can afford gas & food ’til the next stop on their tour.

Possibly the coolest part of all this, btw, is that the Double Dave’s folks have sworn to send out the flyer for the show with every delivery order. I would order pizza far, far more frequently than I do now if my local pizza joints (you listening, Domino’s?) did something similar. (Of course, the place closest to me doesn’t even have room to sit down & has the pizza-makers behind a metal-and-glass cage, so I’m guessing they wouldn’t be able to do much in the way of show-hosting…)