Goldrush at Garfield Artworks, Pittsburgh, PA

Yes­ter­day I went to Pitts­burgh and saw Gol­drush, a band I knew noth­ing about, at the Garfield Art­works. I sup­pose Gol­drush is clas­si­fied as shoegaz­er, which despite the emo-esque name, isn’t emo. [Thank Christ.] Also play­ing were Hopewell and a local band called Ennui [Their site appears to be down], that I did­n’t stay to lis­ten to.

It was a strange set since the local band went on last. I got to Pitts­burgh a bit after 8, but Gol­drush had­n’t arrived yet, so I end­ed up down the street at Crazy Mocha, a cof­fee­house with free Wi-Fi and the best god­damn chai lat­te I’ve ever had. They closed about ten min­utes after I got there though. When I made it back to the Garfield Art­works, Hopewell had just start­ed. The Art­works isn’t a very good venue for live music, it is long and nar­row, so the sounds get fun­neled and end up bounc­ing off of each oth­er. Hopewell did a good job set­ting up the stan­dard wall-of-sound, despite this acoustic odd­i­ty, and had added bonus­es of a high and qua­v­ery-voiced lead singer and some good minia­ture jam ses­sions. Gol­drush was very good; you could eas­i­ly tell that each of their songs was fine­ly craft­ed, but they also weren’t bound to play­ing the songs in the same way. They def­i­nite­ly had fun doing their thing.

It is a shame, that with such good bands, the crowd was vir­tu­al­ly nonex­is­tent, about 5 peo­ple. More peo­ple showed up for the local band, Ennui [which for some rea­son played last, a fact worth men­tion­ing a sec­ond time] than lis­tened to either Hopewell or Gol­drush. I did get three free stick­ers to add to my gui­tar case though. My first view of Pitts­burgh, com­ing in on 279, was pret­ty awe­some: hills, hills, hills, hills, curve, Pitts­burgh! It was dark out too, so the sky­line was pret­ty groovy. I also found my first grey [actu­al­ly white] hair today. It is in my beard.

Link of the Day: Tons of free sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries, by good authors, thanks to MetaFil­ter.