Madness on Main 2018, Coming Up Next Weekend (Rundown, Pt. 1): Cheers to Good Problems + Rocky Banks + Metanoia + Veso Vega + War Twins + Killem Collective + Third Root + UCHé

Ahhh, yeah. These days it seems like music festivals spring up in this city like mushrooms after a few days’ rain — that is, all over my lawn, goddammit, and never when/where I want them. Um, sort of; sorry, that particular metaphor got away from a me a bit…

But the reality is that there seems to be an ever-increasing number of festivals/mini-festivals/etc. going on here throughout the year. And in general, I’m good with that, even if I can’t make it to every Praia Urbana or In Bloom or Summer Breeze that goes on here in H-town.

That said, some festivals hold a special place in my heart, and one of those is the twice-yearly one-two punch of Madness on Main and Yes, Indeed!, originally started up by SCR‘s own Jason Smith and all-round cool dude Phil “Bassman Pep” Peterson. Jason’s since had to bow out, passing the pair of festivals on to other folks, but Phil’s still doing the booking, I believe, and probably the sound as well, which is a very good thing.

The two festivals are cool, to me, because of their laid-back-ness. They’re not trying to be all things to all concert-goers, the trap a lot of bigger festivals seem to fall into, and they’re more about focusing on bands and musicians you may have never heard before, rather than going for Big-Name Band X and then fumbling around for the rest of the bill.

Hell, they’ve even added a subtitle to the festival itself that fits perfectly: “A Music Discovery Fest”. It’s beautiful, because that’s exactly what Madness on Main is — it’s a cool, low-key music festival that’s all about you & your friends checking out music you’ve maybe never heard before.

I know that’s how it’s always worked for me, in years past; past MoMs/Yes, Indeed!s have introduced me to Keeton Coffman, Blue Healer, JOn Black, Only Beast, Bernie Pink, The Wandering Bufaleros, Moji, Fea, and BLSHS, plus a good dozen others I’m blanking on right now. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve walked out of the various bars & clubs & coffeeshops that have hosted past iterations of the festival shaking my head, saying, “Wow, that was really cool.”

With that, I’m psyched to see the newest Madness on Main rolling around again this coming Saturday, June 9th, once again at the festival’s last-year home on North Main, with stages at White Oak Music Hall and the next-door Raven Tower.

I have to admit that I do miss The Old Days, when the festival was on Main St. in Downtown or Midtown, but hey, I get the logistical reasons behind the move, and no doubt the whole thing will sound miles better than it could’ve, say, on the backyard Pachinko Hut stage. Plus, I dearly, desperately want to go up to the top of the Raven Tower, and it’s been closed for a while, so…

Anyway, there’s a ton of excellent, excellent bands and musicians playing Madness on Main this coming weekend, including
strident punks Giant Kitty (for whom this will be the last show for the year, apparently, or possibly ever, depending who you talk to, so check ’em out while you still can), awesome roots-rockers Second Lovers, smarter-than-you rapper Kyle Hubbard, experimental/indie-rock supergroup Frog Hair, oddball headliner Har Mar Superstar(!), and a whole bunch more.

If you’ve never been, by the way, check out the cool little promo video the Madness folks have put together:

Of course, as always, we’re going to attempt to do our little previews of as many MoM-playing people as we can, starting, um, right now. Here goes:

Cheers to Good Problems
Full disclosure, for those who may not know me all that well: I don’t drink, or at least not much. I used to be a bit more straightedge about it, but these days I’ll very, very occasionally have a Bailey’s or a good whiskey; beer, though, that’s not my thing, although I’m fascinated by the process to make it and all the mythology around it.

So when a band describes itself as a “Drinky Rock Band,” I’ll confess that my eyebrow twitches upwards a bit. Once the band’s First Draught (naturally) EP starts, though, I’m sold pretty damn quickly — I’m enjoying the hell out of singer/guitarist Gary Bailey‘s scuffed-up, desperate-sounding vocals, Paul Williams‘ subtle piano underpinning everything, the “whoa-oh-oh” gang vocals, and the almost Irish-drinking-song feel of the music as a whole.

It makes me think of The Hold Steady at times, Tom Waits at others, and — possibly most tellingly — Thin Lizzy at still others. The band’s sound has kind of a classic-rock vibe to it, although it’s not held down by that but instead uses it as a launching pad to get to somewhere else, kind of in the vein of Austin band Moonlight Towers (who, yes, I also like). Make sure you catch these guys’ set, seriously, and be ready to roar along with the band and stomp your feet, alright?

Rocky Banks
Keeping the honesty going, I’ve got to admit I’d never heard of H-town rapper Rocky Banks ’til seeing his name on the Madness on Main lineup, but after listening, it sure feels like the Madness crew pulled off a far-sighted coup by getting him on there. He may not be the biggest name yet, but he’s already gotten some good press, and I can easily see Banks moving up from here, to the point where he could be playing way, way bigger festivals than this one in, say, a year’s time. Seriously.

Beyond the beats and rhymes on new album Big Little Brother, which are damn good, I’ve gotta appreciate that the guy both points backwards to hip-hop history and doesn’t take himself too damn seriously; check out the video for “Dopeman,” which pays tongue-in-cheek homage to late-’90s flick Belly. And yeah, watching Banks dance down the convenience-store aisle with containers of laundry detergent is freaking hysterical all by itself.

Not that Banks is a lightweight, mind you. In his youth, the Houston-bred MC delved pretty deeply into drugs, eventually nearly dying from a meth overdose, and he’s since cleaned up his life and stayed away — a very good thing, in my book. He touches on that struggle a lot on both Big Little Brother and his 2015 effort, In Other News I Don’t Do Drugs Anymore, particularly on the latter’s “A Lot,” the video for which I would swear was shot in the parking lot at Fondred and 59, not too far from my house…

I digress a bit, but again: you’re going to hear a lot about Rocky Banks in the future; trust me on this. See him now while you can still afford it.

Metanoia
It might seems odd to anybody who’s not from Texas, but we’ve long had our special breed of ska/reggae sound going on down here, and it might not be the kind you think. See, while some folks up in the Northeast melded punk and ska with Irish folk, and Californians merged their ska with surf-punk and streetpunk, Texas (and Houston in particular, I’d say, although I’m probably biased) has a tradition nearly as long of melding ska and reggae sounds with sounds from south of the border. The original “Vatos Rudos,” Los Skarnales, started doing their thing something like 25 years now, and they’ve inspired a whole slew of bands in their wake, helping to create a Latino-tinged Texas ska scene that’s unlike pretty much anywhere else.

Granted, I’ve got no idea if the Metanoia crew calls the Skarnales dudes their collective inspiration, but there’s a similarity to the sound and ethos that’s hard to escape, especially on the more recent stuff I’ve been able to hear. The band’s 2015 release, There is no they., is definitely more psychedelic and hazy, but even back then Metanoia was calling for unity and calling out racism and anti-immigrant sentiment.

More recently, they released a poignant, painful, too-goddamn-true-to-life video for “Fuck Your Borders,” which sees the band playing speeding, fiery, cumbia-, jazz-, and Norteno-ish (to my gringo ears, anyway) ska-rock as they spin out a wordless tale of two desperate migrants headed north, interspersing clips about refugees and migrants all around the world, from Mexico to Syria. It’s painful and raw but awesome in its own way, and I can’t help but love the sentiment and the song.

Veso Vega
Shifting gears pretty radically, now we come to Veso Vega, which I think is a synth-heavy electropop project/band/thing. Maybe. Possibly. The band refers to itself as “Electro Rock,” which…hey, your guess is as good as mine. Oh, and the band name is obviously a play on the word “vasovagal,” which in medical terms relates to a drop in blood pressure, so there’s that, right?

The only thing I really know is that this is Cory Sinclair‘s (Hescher, The Manichean) new band, which he previously promised would be a different beast from both The Manichean and his solo stuff as Hescher. The group has released one teeny-tiny little sliver of music and video so far, entitled “Summer Teaser 2018,” which blends New Order-esque danciness with M83-style atmospherics to make something that’s definitely alluring as hell.

What’s really interesting about the video, though, is that it incorporates footage from Cory’s performance as Hescher at Day for Night this past December, where he appeared with a full backing band and rocked out way more than I’d anticipated, given the slow-moving sound I’d heard from Hescher up to that point. So I suspect that the “Hescher” set was actually Cory trying out Veso Vega on the sly; he sure seemed to be enjoying the hell out of himself up there, and the show was a lot of fun for those of us down on the pavement, too, so I’ve got high hopes for this one…

War Twins
At long last, we get to a non-Houston band on this list, and quite a full-tilt blast of a band, at that. Los Angeles/Philadelphia/Boston band War Twins may only be two people — singer/guitarist Gaetana and drummer/producer James Grey — but they sound like a much, much bigger band, full of fury and menace. Musically, I’m hearing a lot of Downward Spiral-era Nine Inch Nails, along with a powerful, Noisettes-ish soul vibe on the vocals, and a good bit of tribal mystic strangeness that makes me think of fellow duo mr. Gnome.

They’ve got a handful of EPs out so far — some under their previous moniker, Little War Twins — with a new Sylvia Massy-produced album due out this year and a new single, “American Kids,” that’s raw and contemplative at the same time, not to mention full of heavy-ass rock guitars and Rentals-esque “woo-hoo” vocals. Everything I’ve seen and read from these folks so far points to a fucking incredible live show, so I’m pretty psyched, honestly. Keep your eyes open for this set on Saturday, y’all.

Killem Collective
It’s always problematic when it comes to talking about DJs in these little preview things, especially when it’s an actual DJ crew like Houston’s own Killem Collective… Hell, I’m not even sure who’s actually part of the Collective anymore, since it seems like everybody changes but DJ IV. So if any of those dudes in the pic over there aren’t in the crew anymore, um, well, sorry about that, y’all.

Beyond that, it’s hard to separate Killem Collective’s solo stuff from the stuff they’ve done for other people — which may be part of the point, honestly. On the positive side, listening to the Collective’s Soundcloud is alllllll good, pretty much across the board, whether it’s the jazzier, spacier stuff under the Gibbs X IV name or the murky, heavy-lidded sound of the Frank-Synato tracks or the throwback hip-hop of Jedi Jae. I’m enjoying the whole damn thing, and that’s no mean feat.

Third Root
Coming eastward to us from Austin and San Antonio, hip-hop trio Third Root — which consists of MexicanStepGrandfather (and yes, BEST. RAPPER. NAME. EVER.), Easy Lee, and long-gone Houston expat DJ Chicken George (holy shit, that name takes me back…) — is impressively down-to-earth and dead serious. They’re hip-hop with a message, particularly on most recent album Libertad, and they pull no punches at all when it comes to police brutality, crooked politicians, and racism, over jazzy, funky, salsa-tinged tracks produced by fellow Austin legend Adrian Quesada.

It’s awesome, intense stuff, sharp-edged and soulful and smart as hell — which makes sense, given the long, long pedigrees of each of the guys in the group (MexicanStepGrandfather, for one, teaches at UTSA). I find myself thinking of Blackalicious some of the time, especially in terms of Chicken George’s tracks, and Bay Area rapper Paris (not the more recent rapper) in terms of the political thought.

It doesn’t sound like Third Root have done a lot since the album was released back in 2016, but I’m glad they’re still doing this and definitely want to hear more of it.

UCHé
Whoa. Okay, I’ll give this a shot: imagine a six-foot-five, lanky African-American guy who dresses like a cross between David Bowie and an extra from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, dances like Michael Jackson if he were a striking cobra, and croons in a way that somehow brings to mind both Bruno Mars and Usher, all over throwback ’80s party-funk jams that Rick James and/or Mark Ronson would be happy to claim as their own. Got that in your head, at least as well as you can? Well, that’s pretty much UCHé, or the closest approximation I can come up with, anyway.

I was skeptical at first, I’ll admit, but it didn’t take me long to warm up to the insanely-tall, Houston-dwelling, Nigerian-American singer. The music he makes isn’t something I’d normally be into, really, but he makes it work somehow; he’s got that kind of charisma. Apparently he used to be a little more on the buttoned-down side, going by the video for his 2014 single “Shoo Fly,” which garnered him a mentorship deal with Joe Jonas, but these days he’s fully embraced a wilder, more flamboyant style that (I think, anyway) fits the music better.

How will UCHés sound and spectacle work at Madness on Main’s relatively small-scale stage? No clue, but it should be entertaining to see, whatever happens…

That’s all we’ve got time for right now, but keep checking back, alright? More soon…

(Photos: Metanoia photo by Tramane Browne; War Twins photo by Cory Ingram.)