Yr. Weekend, Pt. 1: Mineral + Holder + Honey & Salt + Since Always + Distant Worker + The Wiggins + More

Best intentions, y’all — I’d meant to get this up earlier, but got dragged into playing video games with The Little Guy, instead, because he wanted Daddy to play, too. Sorry for the delay, folks; there’s still time to get on out there and see what all’s going on tonight, Friday, January 9th:

Mineral/Josh T. Pearson/duneTX @ Fitzgerald’s
Oh, man. Anybody who reads this site with some regularity knows that yes, I’m a big, big fan of old-school, ’90s-style emo; that’s what I listened to post-college, especially as relationships around me went sour and friends moved away, and one of the first of those bands I ever heard and fell in love with was a band from Austin (well, Houston, originally, but they then moved to Austin) called Mineral. To me, at least, they were eye-opening, an impassioned, desperate, thoughtful, melodic roar that encapsulated everything I loved about music.

Frontman Chris Simpson‘s voice, in particular, was amazing, simultaneously ethereal and stately and torn wide open and raw, and he and Scott McCarver‘s guitars became the sound I associated with all emo from that point forward. Even after the band broke up, I could hear their influence, that specific sound, echoing through a ton of bands who came after (the fact that the members of the bands went on to form The Gloria Record, Imbroco, and Pop Unknown helped, too). Now when I think “emo band,” the sound I hear in my head is Mineral’s absolutely classic (and posthumous, I believe) 1998 release, EndSerenading.

Sadly, I never got to see the band live the first time around, and I’m betting most people out there reading this never did, either. Now’s your chance to fix that.

Holder/Honey & Salt/Since Always (ex-Midnight Norma Lane) @ Rudyard’s
And here’s where it gets tough. See, not only is the Mineral show tonight up at Fitzgerald’s, but over at Rudyard’s, there’re some other familiar faces from the ’90s, albeit ones that were a little bit closer to home for yours truly…

{Brand New Hearts}, whom I love dearly, was scheduled to play tonight and had to cancel, unfortunately, but two of the three bands playing up at Rudz tonight qualify on their own as bona fide H-town supergroups, even still, with the third being one of the brightest, most promising bands in town for the past year or two.

{Holder} headlines, which is awesome because the band does a great, great emo/indie-rock throwback thing and includes members of Badger, {The Tie That Binds}, and Radio Pioneer, and then Austin band Honey & Salt plays heavy, jazz/prog-influenced math-rock-ish stuff and features former Houstonian (and long-ago SCR writer) Danny Mee on drums. Opening is the band that used to be known as Midnight Norma Lane, and who released a stellar EP under that name back in 2012, out of the freaking blue; these days they go by {Since Always}, but I’m hopeful the name change hasn’t modified their dreampop-on-fire sound.

Extended Stay, featuring Distant Worker (mem. of Fiskadoro) & The Wiggins @ Civic TV Collective (2119 Dallas)
Last but not least, there’s some excellent quirkiness going on over at a new-ish venue called Civic TV Collective; it’s an opening for a show by artists Andy Grotfeldt and Luke Harnden (the venue’s primarily an art-space, it seems), and after the art-opening festivities are mostly done, they’re gonna let both {The Wiggins} and Distant Worker out on the floor to do their thing.

The former, as I’ve mentioned a few times previously around here, is a whole lot of weird, raw fun, with Jon Read doing his best to grab hold of bluesy rawk and Motown soul and drag ’em down through the chemical-laced H-town mud. The latter, on the other hand, is a new project by Richard Kimball and Jennifer Kimball, who you might remember from Angleton/Lake Jackson-area oddballs {Fiskadoro}; I have yet to hear this new band (and yeah, I really need to), but I’ve always been impressed by the pair’s unique, almost tribal-industrial sounds, so I’ve got pretty high hopes. Get on over there, alright?

Runners-Up:
Ed Hall/Pong @ The Continental Club
Thanks For Socializing/End of the West/O Conqueror/The Jess Wilson Band @ Notsuoh