Astral Bitch throat rips local henchmen at The Jungle on Friday, 1 September 2023.

Dropbear, Slow Quit, and Luxury Deathtrap don’t eat the big white mints in the opening slots.

If you’ve never seen the 80s popcorn flick Road House, check it out. The late Patrick Swayze plays an itinerant bouncer who teams up with an avuncular Sam Elliot to keep a reasonable amount of order at the local whiskey & honky tonk joint.

But Swayze falls hard for the girlfriend of the biggest crime boss in town, and everything goes sideways.

Before the end of the film you learn that muscular loverboy has a secret talent – throat ripping – which comes in handy for the final boss battle. Not sure what school of martial arts throat ripping factors into. Swayze sells it with panache, like it’s a completely normal, if solemn, task he must perform.

At another place and time, The Jungle would be your prototypical road house. The music is loud enough, the booze plentiful, and there’s something about the layout of the place that begs for a bar fight. Not that we’re endorsing violence – don’t fight, kids!

Dropbear

Haven’t we seen this film before? Dropbear on a bill with Astral Bitch…

It was at The Sinclair in July, and the pair of bands were on a bill with Sapling and Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys.

You couldn’t fit the Army on the stage at The Jungle if you wanted to. As it was, the five members of Dropbear had to tread carefully to fit the musical pileup of guitar necks, drum kit, and microphone cords into the limited space.

What you lose in open tarmac, you gain in explosiveness. The altrockers laid down thunderous rock rhythms.

Particularly the bass drum, which dropped kicks so deep and meaty you felt your internal organs dislodged and bouncing freely inside your ribcage.

Slow Quit

The fourpiece gazey grinders Slow Quit crafted instrumental-forward howlers. In fact, the vocals felt like kind of a take-it-or-leave-it thing. Like J Mascis throwing in a few lyrics so that he can tell his record company that he’s making pop songs before he launches into the next Grand Canyon-sized solo. It was the textures of the layered guitars, and the tense rhythms knotting the textures together, that made hay for the Allston band. Shout out to the noise intro for the song “Metabolic Riff”.

Luxury Deathrap

The local altrock quartet released the EP This Armor in May, a chunk of which was recorded at the old Sound Museum. RIP the former practice home to many of the bands that play The Jungle stage. The Bandcamp liner notes are quick to observe the location is now a “biotech lab with a progressive coffee house.”

It’s all part of a long term plan to turn the Boston cultural scene into a kind of San Francisco where artists commute into the city they can’t afford to live in to play for bored, wealthy strangers.

Sounds good!

Astral Bitch

The bill buddies with Dropbear closed out the show.

Astral Bitch is a sort of throwback booze, cigarettes, and leather vibe. More hard rock or proto punk than metal. A little psych.

You could picture them playing behind the chicken wire fence on the honky tonk stage in the original Blues Brothers movie. You know, the one with all the fussin’ & fightin’ and a savage crowd that could only be soothed with umpteen renditions of the Rawhide theme song.

Happily, there was no throat ripping at The Jungle on Friday night.

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