Fall Into Some Local Music -By: Johnny Mystery

Your everlasting summer has faded. Soon your complaints about humidity will be replaced by pumpkin spiced everything. Forget it, okay. You do know we live in one of the best areas of the country for live local music. I didn’t make that up. Go check. I’ll wait…see, I told you.

Not just you’re typical, garden variety bar bands and sappy singer songwriters linger here. I’m not easily impressed but what I can impress upon you are some acts who put their own stamps on original and cover tunes. Some bands most of those other sheets won’t talk about.

Take The Jagaloons. We’ve got one of the best surf instrumental bands living and playing in our own back yard. They’re also known and play all over our big country, but they play here too and call it home. Lucky us. Get out and see them. Oh yeah, they have an album out. Play it at 33 and 1/3 please and groove to the hypnotic, surfy reverb beat. Dig the cover of them portrayed as action figures. Coolness? You better believe it. They win over every crowd.

Old school punk in the vein of Wire is being pumped out by Troy’s own Zombie Giuliani. I got turned on to them by the great and famous radio/record store dude, Jimmy Barrett. I got their cassette. It’s green. I can’t give you the title of it, because this is a family friendly periodical. You’ll have to go out and pick one up for yourself and you won’t be sorry. I wanna know where they recorded this. It’s nine songs of pure attitude. 

Do you remember North Allen? Of course, you do. They put out two CDs once upon a time. They played some pretty high profile shows with some high-profile people, then for reasons only known to them, split up. Well, they’re back. Well, half of them at least as The North Allen Duo. Cut the band in half and double the profits. Smart guys! They do covers now but they make them their own. I bet if you ask them real nice, they’ll do something they wrote. I hope they record. Look for them and their shows on social media, you digital derelicts. 

Somebody put me in touch with The Sews from Kingston. Yeah, they’re only sort of local, but I don’t care. I caught them at No Fun recently. In fact, I almost missed them. I was headed for the door when I heard the crash of a discordant guitar. I turned around and there they were. Girl on guitar, guy on drums. This was lo-fi heaven. The guitar sounded like it was coming out of a boom box whilst tumbling in a washing machine. Got with the band afterwards and this lady uses an olive green, Soviet surplus, Big Muff Fuzz knock off. She’s also not sure about the tunings as the guitar was prepared in the car on the way up. They gave me a cassette they recorded in their basement. Seriously, these guys are just too perfect. I have no more info on them but hope they come around again.

The other groups in this article are very active and deserve your attention. Find them, friend them and go see them. Get their music and support them. That’s the only way they’ll keep performing.

Also, coming to Troy on September 30th through October 2nd is Bacchanalia. It’s an entire weekend of local, national and elsewhere bands on the order of 100 plus, playing various venues around the city. We’ll talk more about it next month along with some of my favorite Halloween records. Don’t tell me you didn’t see that coming. Now get out and support local music.