KTRU Monthly Concert Series, (Re-)Starting Tonight

Got some news a few days back about a new monthly concert series put on by the KTRU crew, specifically the combined forces of the Local Show and the Mutant Hardcore Flower Hour; Kirston, Rosa, and the rest of the gang will be putting on shows on a Thursday each month (during the Mutant Hardcore show), for free, with cheapo beers, and featuring (of course) an awesome bunch of bands. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it could be because Kirston was doing something similar for a while over at the Landmark River Oaks theater, before management shut the shows down.

The shows will be on the Rice campus, over at Valhalla — if you don’t know where it is, I can’t really blame you, since it’s in the basement of one of the campus lecture halls, but if you can get to the campus, just ask somebody, and they’ll surely be able to tell you.

Tonight (Thurs., January 28th), by the way, happens to be the inaugural show for this series, kicking things off with Chelsea Hotel and The Matt Mayo Band, both of whom I happen to think are pretty damn cool. Despite being Conroe residents, the former do a country-tinged brand of old-school punk, harking back to the genre’s earliest days but with a heavy dose of rockabilly thrown in, while the latter are more straight-up rock, grafting Hüsker Dü-like melodies onto what’re basically roots-rock burners; they both do what they quite nicely. I need to hear more from both bands, seriously.

It’s kind of weird, really, but although I went to the university, I never actually ventured inside Valhalla ’til after graduation; at the time, at least, it was the grad student bar, and undergrads either went to Willy’s (’til that asshat set it on fire, anyway) or drank in their rooms at one of the colleges. Granted, I don’t generally drink much, if at all, so I may not be a great representative sample for this, but I’d swear that the bar was like a no-go zone for anybody who wasn’t either a non-student or working on an advanced degree in somethingorother. (In an odd bit of almost-synchronicity, however, my future wife-to-be did hang out there quite a bit, apparently, during my time at Rice, when she was going to U of H. Funny, that.)

Anyway, these shows sound like they’re going to be good. And hey, you can’t beat free, right? Get on over to the Rice ‘hood tonight — the show starts at 10PM.