I tend to find out about new music from the randomest sources these days. One of them is WFMU and their stunningly good website, plus its affiliated Free Music Archive. Last spring I really got into this set of music from a California garage rock band called Bare Wires. You should check it out! Download it! It is excellent!

So I was pretty stoked to see Bare Wires in the listings for the Velvet Lounge. I somehow managed to get a couple friends to go with me on a Monday night to see these guys, that is just how stoked I was.

I hadn’t been to a Velvet Lounge show in ages, aside from a few ill-begotten nights like a blurry Windian Records showcase that I couldn’t remember enough about to write up. Everything starts really late at the Velvet Lounge. There also tend to be lots of young people there that spit beer on bands. And punks! I don’t know, I am just a little too old to be hanging out at shows there, though I like the downstairs bar a lot.

The openers were Maybe Baby, part of that same local Windian scene. I think I might have seen them before. They were sort of like a blur of noisy punk-pop. Fun, but again, you know, I am not that into beer-spitting. And I was looking at my watch, wondering when Bare Wires would go on, if ever.

Next were a band called Gestapo Khazi. I don’t remember much about them. It was late on a Monday, ya know? Hard to concentrate on these random noisy bands. I would have been a lot more into this stuff when I was ten years younger. I think they were on tour with the headliners, the ones I was trying to stay awake for.

Finally we got to hear Bare Wires. Good stuff! They remind me a little of the Strokes, and I really think that they could turn out to be pretty big. The songs are tight, and they sounded pretty good live, to the extent that I was not nodding off on my feet. Of course, I already expected them to sound good, since they had been smoking on that WFMU show. This is the kind of music that even parents would probably like. I honestly think this band could blow up and be pretty popular, and if they do I will get to tell the story of how I talked to the singer after the show and bought their CD. The CD is good, too, though not essential. But go see these guys, everyone! Support them! They deserve some success, more than a lot of the terrible bands getting popular these days…