Last night I went to the Talking Head to see Rjyan Kidwell's new band, Sand Cats, play their first show ever. I've followed Rjyan's exploits on the Baltimore scene since shortly after he started performing under the name Cex a few years ago. Actually, the first time I saw him was almost exactly 5 years ago, and at the same club, when it was still the old Ottobar. He's kind of an odd guy and I get the feeling that he's pretty villified in the indie scene to the extent that people know of him. He's carved out a pretty strange path and I haven't enjoyed everything he's done, although I've seen him do some great shows and I really enjoy some of his albums. Over the last year or two he'd been kind of quiet, not releasing much, and I think for a while he lived in Chicago, and got married, but he moved back to Baltimore recently.

Sand Cats is just Rjyan and his wife Roby, and that's all I knew about the band before the show. It was...interesting. There were costumes. And kind of a theatrical element, with scripted dialogue between the songs. They both played master warriors with ridiculous names and they did battle with their instruments, him on drums and her on an electric bass. She played with a bow and made these awesome guttural bass sounds, and he just kind of pounded away primitively, accompanied a pre-recorded CD of screeching noise. Kind of the same way I remember playing drums when I got my first kit, hitting the drums as hard as possible without a very well honed sense of rhythm. It was supposed to be a fight to the death but I guess it ended as a draw. Tom was there, and before their set we were talking a lot about professional wrestling, and the whole Sand Cats thing ended up kind of fitting into that whole conversation pretty well.

Labels: Baltimore music, concerts

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23, 2005 at 5:22 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.