After their big show with The Mighty Hannibal in Atlanta last Friday, the ever fervent band of gypsies, The Black Lips, headed out on a West-Coast tour and this Friday at Dante's in Portland they meet up with The Hunches to kick it off. After two albums, The Hunches have proven to be quite an anomaly. Their first full-length on In The Red hit with a pretty muddy splash and it seems like the world had been shaken from a slumber to a band whose sound smashes the mid-80s psychedelic mind-dump into a wall of tortured and overwrought wails. Delivering scab-hearted ballads that spin into suicide pacts and noisy back-alley crescendos right in line with one another, all with a fierce animalistic death stare, The Hunches leave other bands on the noise wall behind. Sometimes slipping into a caustic psychedelic mind-warp, it seems they have got more layers to their sound than first revealed. The simple garbage-can drum beats bleed into a minefield of screeching feedback, humming pandemonium and vocals that are delivered in a reverberant and haunting tone, and it all comes to a head that bursts with energy that only a learned anxiety can muster. Opening, right in file with The Hunches, are Reptilian Civilian also from Portland.
Here's a video of The Hunches perfoming "This Human Propeller" at Kraftbrau Brewery, Kalamazoo, MI.
