Awesome Color - Awesome Color

I know it’s kind of chickenshit to suggest this, but I’ve always considered the annual Baker’s Dozen lists as kind of a living, breathing thing. It’s not as if I just do a list of my favorite albums and then forget about it because, inevitably, I discover something that I missed from that specific year and fall in love with it. With that being said, the opposite is also true; there are albums that I’m very infatuated with initially and then years later I think, “Why did I feel this was so great?” The Mars Volta immediately comes to mind.
Therefore, I occasionally change my Baker’s Dozen lists and it appears that I may have to do so for 2006 as the Dinosaur Jr. show last December introduced me to a band that I have never heard of before.
After enduring a very shitty local garage band of middle-aged dudes, we prepped for the headliners and then returned to The Picador to the delightful sounds of a three-piece bashing away at some straightforward rock action.
Initially, the friend I was with made a comment about the drummer being so young, and I too thought, “Wow, he’s just a kid.” The key word is “he” as I discovered a pair of lumps on the chest of this flailing percussionist and discovered that it was a chick keeping time. To be honest, I was a little bummed because I actually thought the idea of having an underage kid that looked like a skinny beach bum with dirty blonde hair playing drums was pretty fucking cool. The fact that in reality there’s a chick drumming for the band didn’t detour me from thinking they were good, it’s just not as unique as it was when Mo Tucker spent a year here last week.
The band I’m referring to, Awesome Color, is a three piece from New York City and they specialize in that hard-to-fuck-up genre of Motor City riffage while they excel at maximize at keeping that genre remarkably pure, honest, and a lot of fun.
I did the right thing by approaching the trio after the show and shelling out $10 for gas money and a copy of their debut cd. They had cassettes available to of other material, which I thought was completely cool until I remembered that I was running out of devices that could actually play a cassette. In retrospect, I should have bought one, as one of my newfound goals is to support people who kick and scream against advancing technology when there’s really not much wrong with the technology it’s replacing.
I made a comment to vocalist/guitarist Derek Stanton that they did a really good job that evening and he seemed appreciative enough. I inquired about the merch and said that if the cd were half as good as their live show, I would be happy with it. The aforementioned female drummer, Allison Busch, suggested that their live shows are typically much better than the performances they capture on tape.
At the same time, I learned after playing Awesome Color that it’s not far from the raucous rawk that I witnessed in the flesh. In fact, there are aspects of it that occasionally improve on it.
The album, produced by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and made available on his Ecstatic Peace! label, is a finely honed tribute to everything Stoogy and is, without question, more of a Stooges record that The Weirdness ever was. Iggy would have been much better off handing over a jar of peanut butter to this power trio as there’s more spirit and respect to his Ann Arbor band’s legacy that he could ever muster by revamping the Stooges’ font. For Christsakes, the young ‘uns even bring out an “L.A. Blues”-esque sax solo on “Hat Energy,” which is reason enough to convince you to pursue these guys (and gal) on some kind of format while advising you not to miss ‘em if they show up near your backyard.
As awesome as this band is (and let’s be honest, Awesome Color is a truly awful name for a band), there is nothing groundbreaking going on here. At the same time, it doesn’t have to be, because they execute their influence with so much passion that it sounds just as exciting as the first time you heard Fun House. Because of that, I think it’s time to make room for a little bit of Awesome Color somewhere in my “best of” list from ’06.
There’s time for you to consider it too.