The Modern Faces face the modern at Silhouette Lounge on Wednesday, 13 November 2024.

Perfectly Lethal, Whyte Lipstick, and Luddites open the quadruple-stack bill.

The security grate on the big window got stuck in the shut position, just like that first Clerks movie, but they fixed it later.

The actual Luddites, you know, from the history books, were 19th-century workers revolting against the introduction of modern machinery into the workplace. Isn’t that right?

And isn’t that how we should all feel about the coercive introduction of AI into the workplace today? Even if you like fucking around with that software to make goofy pictures, nothing good will come of it in the end. Humanity is not flailing about because we’re capable of too few computer calculations at too slow of a clip. We make far too many already! And we don’t need computers in the decision-making loop so we can make even more.

Not sure how the opening band Luddites feel about AI. The four-piece covered that “867-5309/Jenny” song and rocked a proto-punk kind of sound. Somewhere else I ruminated about the difference between “pre-” and “proto-” relative to genre descriptors. Not sure if I even believe what I wrote.

Is the fronter for Whyte Lipstick the fronter for Electric Street Queens? That has to be the case.

This time the fronter’s got a guitar slung over her shoulder, instead of just a mic with the ESQ, so the venue-wide stage antics are much diminished. Instead, Whyte Lipstick provides a kind of cool, straight ahead indie punk trio with vocals traded between guitar and drums.

The four-piece Perfectly Lethal claimed they usually dressed “gothier” for gigs, but on Wednesday night the band uniform was black bottoms and white t-shirt tops, with various insignias, including a Fleetwood Mac logo.

Their sound was punk – I guess this was punk night at Silhouette Lounge? I’m slow on the uptake. There was a little bit more of an Aughtsy, indie pop flavor to their punk though. One of the guitarists had this stylized kind of rough strum across the six strings that wouldn’t have looked entirely out of place in a neo mod rawker band.

The two guitarists switched back and forth between rhythm and lead. And the bassist was working his way through a bottle of Heineken, which he stored underfoot while playing, constantly in danger of being knocked over into the rest of the electronics.

The Modern Faces is one of those punk bands that sound like a scuffed-up version of 50s rock n roll. The pop instinct is that pure. The structure, if not the texture, of the songs was that clean. The lyrics, no surprise, wouldn’t pass the Dick Clark test, but otherwise this was its own kind of poppy punk (but not “pop punk”). That’s what I heard Wednesday night. Good stuff. The pit enjoyed milling into each other, but this wasn’t boot kicking music.

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