So I think S PRCSS are pretty great. Last time I saw them I compared them to Lungfish. This time they also reminded me a little of Fugazi, what with the two guitarist/singer line-up. It is fun to see bald dudes playing jagged post-hardcore again. I have been waiting forever for a renaissance of this kind of music and I can’t wait to hear their next album.

I feel bad that I missed opener Hume. I have been wanting to see them and my friends told me they were good. I am screwing things up at the Black Cat lately, the shows are going on earlier than I expect. Maybe it’s just the backstage that starts fairly early? I swear I will try to see Hume soon. Because I think they are part of something good.

S PRCSS is sort of a band from nowhere at this point, DC/New York/elsewhere? So it is a stretch to call them a DC band. But I think they — along with Hume — are part of a pretty exciting time in local music. It seems to me that sometime in the early oughts the local music scene got super boring. Partly this has to do with me getting older and out of touch, and also I left the city for a while there and didn’t know what was happening. But. In the late-’90s to turn-of-the-millennium, here were some of the local bands playing around town: Fugazi, The Dismemberment Plan, Ted Leo, Burning Airlines, Flin Flon, The Make Up, Faraquet, Dead Meadow, Quix*o*tic, Crom-Tech/Orthrelm, Frodus. There were even lesser bands like Canyon, Pines of Nowhere, Bluetip, El Guapo, Q and Not U, the Rondelles. It was pretty astonishing. DC has a reputation for its music scene of the ’80s and early ’90s but I think the late ’90s were also fantastic.

By, say, 2005, though, what did we have? Medications. Edie Sedgwick. A few other leftovers from the ’90s. Mary Timony and Bob Mould moved to town. But the young crop of indie bands just never impressed me at all. Lots of boring post-Pitchfork, post-Postal Service, earnest indie bands. It felt like indie music appropriate for LNS-style socialites, not a real scene. Of course this is my own fault as much as anyone’s — nobody was holding me back from doing more with my own modest musical talent.

Luckily, though, it feels like things are picking up, and that other people are not being as lazy as me. There are bands like Hume and Imperial China and BLDNGS and semi-local bands like S PRCSS going strong. There is a thriving experimental scene that is spilling over into interesting rock music. I’ve really been digging the folks at Sockets Records and highly recommend their stuff. There is still a bit of a Dischord-related scene (I still want to hear the new Aquarium songs). Frodus is back together. It’s exciting!

I don’t want to go back to the past, I just want a reason to support local musicians again. These are the folks doing it…