Doc Hopper, Sinkhole, New Sweet Breath

Middle East Cafe, Cambridge, MA

I'm still kind of getting used to finding the quickest ways around the Boston area since I moved closer to the city; I ended up taking what might've been the longest possible route to get to the Middle East and, thanks to my navigational brilliance, missed about half of New Sweet Breath's set. I really like this band (photo, right), but some of their newer material (I haven't heard the new album yet) seemed kind of slow and more experimental. I won't judge the album without hearing it, but I (and the crowd) seemed to get more into their older, faster stuff. Overall NSB sounded good, although the vocals should've been louder — if you didn't know the song they were playing, you had no idea what he was saying. 

I ran into Eliot (one of Sinkhole's guitarists) before they went on, and he informed me that I picked a good night to see them: this was to be the last show for Sinkhole (below). That was a real downer because I really like their music, but I was glad that I did come to the show instead of being lame and staying home. Maybe it was just my mind making the most of the last time hearing Sinkhole live, but they sounded better than ever. Chris Pierce was only half-joking when he complained of getting tired playing song after song requiring blazingly-fast drums, but he lived through it. They played a good set of songs from all three albums — including a lot of my personal favorites — and survived a barrage of A.G's request from the crowd. Chris put it best at the end of their set: "Baseball been beddy, beddy good to Sinkhole." 

Apparently Chris wasn't tired enough from playing one set per show, so his band Doc Hopper headlined — not only this show, but all of the shows on this short tour. The last time I saw Doc Hopper they were kind of sloppy, but they were much tighter this time (despite how drunk bassist Jon Madden appeared...). They debuted a lot of new songs off their yet-to-be-released new album, and it sounds promising. The band always has fun performing (I don't think I've seen another band jump around quite as much), and you never know what you'll see. Although there wasn't anything as extreme as Chris getting naked or anything, we still were treated to Matt Anderson's Cinderella-style around-the-neck guitar toss. Plus at one point they all switched instruments, and despite one humorous comment from the audience — "Great, now they're really gonna suck!" — they didn't suck, and instead blew the roof off the dump with a killer Black Flag cover. 

Uploaded September 1997