I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: June 22, 2017] Sneaks

Sneaks was second on the bill opening for Chastity Belt.

I ended my post about Joy Again by coming out of the bathroom.  Well, while I was on line, I kinda thought that Sneaks was standing behind me.  But I’d only watched one video from her so I wasn’t sure and didn’t want to be presumptuous.  Well, I was right, because the woman wearing the Space Jam T-shirt climbed up on stage with the same shirt tied in a knot and, now, glitter all over her face.

I hadn’t heard Sneaks, so I checked out her bandcamp.  Sneaks is basically a one-woman show.  She plays bass and sings/raps/freestyles over her punky bass and a drum machine.  She has a lo-fi recording out and a more polished disc.  I would have loved both of these records when I was in college–the DIY punk attitude is pretty great.  But I didn’t love either one all that much the other day.

But she was great live.

She has a great raw punk bass sound–it reminds me of the sound of Black Flag or maybe even of Kim Gordon–at one point she chanted “Sonic Youth Sonic Youth, they’re my favorite band.” Her riffs were cool, and while repeated a lot, they were certainly interesting enough to keep a song going.

She was also accompanied by a DJ (all of my pictures of him were blurry), whose name I didn’t catch.  He kept some good beats and threw in some interesting sound effects.  It gave the show a bit more spontaneity than I was expecting from a drum machine based show.

Sneaks played a whole bunch of songs (most of them are quite short about 2 minutes or so).  Each song had a cool or interesting bass riff, she sang (deadpan) around it for 2 minutes and that was it.  She also did a couple of songs with no bass, just a freestyle rap over the drum machine.  And after 35 or so minutes she was done.

Since I nearly ran into her before the show it only made sense that her DJ was standing next to me for a bit during Chastity Belt.  We shook hands and then he was gone like a ghost in the night.

I took more pictures but they were all pretty blurry and that blonde woman’s head took up most of the space in all of them.  I posted this one because I really like the backdrop of them playing behind themselves.